364 
SPICES 
CHAP. 
gardens in their houses.” He mentions it also every- 
where in the Moluccas and in Calicut. 
Both Capsicum minimum, the bird’s-eye pepper, 
and C. annuum, are figured by Garcia, who mentions a 
yellowish-coloured variety cultivated at Lisbon. 
C. annuum was cultivated in England by Gerarde 
in 1597, and it was at that time sold in the shops at 
Billingsgate under the name of ginnie pepper. 
By this time it appears to have been well distributed 
all over the warmer parts of the world, and a consider- 
able number of varieties have since been established, 
varying in size and form of fruit, and in colour, black, 
purple, red, yellow, or white. 
NAMES 
The name capsicum {/ca'\ln/c6p) was first used by 
Actuarius, a Greek writer of the eleventh century, but 
it is obvious that it could not have signified the plant 
now known by this name, as it was not then discovered. 
Fuchs, in 1542, called it Siliquastrum, or Calicut pepper. 
Clusius seems to have first called it capsicum, and it 
was also called, in the sixteenth century, Indian pepper 
and Guinea pepper. The French call it still Poivre 
dTnde or Poivre de Guinee, but more commonly Piment 
or Piment de Cayenne ; the Germans, Spanischer 
Pfeffer. In English, it is known as Pod Pepper, Ked 
Pepper, Chilies, or Capsicum. The only original native 
names for the spice are “ Agi,” in Spanish America, and 
“ Quija” or “ Quiya” in Brazil (Piso and Marcgraf). 
In Eastern Asia there are no original native names, 
all being compounds of the local word for pepper, with 
some qualifying word signifying some locality from 
which it was derived, or its colour, such as Gawai mirchi 
(Goa pepper) in Bombay, Lada merah (Ked pepper) 
or Lada China (Chinese pepper) in Malay, showing 
clearly that it was only known to the Asiatics as an 
introduction. 
