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of cinnamon, known at the Oroonoko by the 

 names of varimacu and of canelilla*. This 

 valuable production is found also in the valley 

 of Rio Caura, as well as near the Esmeralda, 

 and east of the Great Cataracts. The jesuit 

 Francisco de Olmo appears to have been the 

 first who discovered the canelilla, which he did 

 in the country of the Piaroas, near the sources 

 of the Cataniapo. The missionary Gili, who 

 did not advance so far as the country I am now 

 describing, seems to confound the varimacu 

 or guarimacu, with the myristica-j- or nutmeg- 

 tree of America. These barks and aromatic 

 fruits, the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the myrthus 

 pimenta, and the laurus pucheri, would have 

 become important objects of trade, if Europe, at 

 the period of the discovery of the New World, 

 had not already been accustomed to the spices 

 and aromatics of India. The cinnamon of the 

 Oroonoko, and that of the Andaquies missions, 



* The diminutive of the Spanish word canela, which signi- 

 fies, cinnaraomum (kinnamomon of the Greeks). This last 

 word is among the small number of those, which passed in 

 the most remote antiquity from the Phoenician (a Semitic 

 tongue) into the western languages. (Gessenius Gesch. der 

 Hebraischen Sprache, 1815, p. 66.) 



+ We have given a figure of a nutmeg tree of the New 

 Continent, the myristica otoba, in the " Equinoctial Plants," 

 vol. ii, p. 78, plate 103. This plant differs from the virola 

 sebifera of Aublet. 



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