130 NATURAL AND ECONOMICAL HISTORY 
The ordinary price of jagery is about 2d. per pound. 
It is the only sugar used by the native inhabitants, and no 
other is prepared in Ceylon. They enjoy the juice of the 
cane, by masticating the green shoots, but in no other way, 
although they have a name for sugar extracted in other 
countries from this plant, which is since or cliinee. The 
common soldiers ordinarily use jagery ; and many Euro- 
peans of the upper ranks prefer it to a more refined species 
of sugar for sweetening coffee. Sugar-candy, which is 
chiefly imported from China, is the saccharine substance 
commonly used by the higher classes of Europeans in 
India. In some parts of the interior of Ceylon, particu- 
larly in the vicinity of Adam'*s Peak, great numbers of the 
inhabitants support themselves by extracting a sweet juice 
from the nepery tree {Caryota iirens), and manufacturing 
it into jagery. This tree grows spontaneously in the woods. 
The people thus employed, subsist chiefly upon coarse su- 
gar. They occasionally procure a little rice and salt by 
barter, but they do not raise grain by cultivating the soil. 
There is some foundation for supposing, that the sugar 
of the ancients, which seems to have been imported from 
India, was the produce of the palm family of plants, and 
not that of the sugar-cane. Salmasius, the commentator 
of Pliny, is decidedly of opinion, that the sugar of the 
moderns is the produce of a different plant from that 
which produced the sugar of the Greeks and Romans. 
All the authors on this subject, with whose writings I am 
acquainted, describe the sugar of the ancients as being of 
a very coarse quality, and mixed with a large portion of 
molasses, exactly resembling jcLgcry^ the produce of some 
of the palms. Virey, in his Account of Sugar, says ex- 
pressly, that *' le premier sucre apporte des Indes n'etoit 
qu'une moscouade (sucre brnt).^'' And, in an Essay upon 
the History of the Commerce of Venice, it is stated, that 
the sugar which was manufactured in Sicily, as early as 
