MYRISTICA MOSCHATA. THE NUTMEG TREE. 
Class XXII. DICECIA.— Order XII. MONADELPHIA. 
Natural Order, MYRISTICE.E. — THE NUTMEG TRIBE. 
Fig. (a) Starnineous flower cut open to show the column of stamens. (4) Pistilline flower cut open to show the pistil, 
(c) Ripe fruit in the act of bursting, showing the nut included in the mace, natural size. 
(el) The mace from which the nut has been removed. (e) the seed or nutmeg with part of its shell. 
Spec. Char. Leaves elliptic-oblong, smooth, pointed, paler beneath, with simple parallel nerves. Perianth 
of one leaf, coriaceous, urceolate. Peduncles with few flowers. 
The Nutmeg, called Nux inyristica, or balsam nut, by the old writers, from the Greek /zr/ncmKos, balsamica, 
is a dioecious tree, a native of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands ; but is principally confined to that group 
denominated the islands of Banda, lying in lat. 4° 30' south, where it bears blossoms and fruit all the year. 
This tree is compared by Rumphius to a common pear-tree with respect to size and appearance ; it is 
said to bear fruit at ten years’ growth, which improves in quality, and increases in quantitv, until the tree 
attained the age of an hundred years. The trunk rises to the height of twenty-five feet, clothed with a 
greyish-brown and tolerably smooth bark, abounding in a yellow juice, and bearing many whorls of spreading 
branches. The leaves, which stand alternately on short petioles, are from three to six inches long, sub- 
bifarious, oblong, glabrous, pointed, rather obtuse at the base, undulated, entire, of a dark green colour, and 
somewhat glossy above, beneath much paler, but neither pulverent nor downy ; with simple, parallel nerves, 
a little branched at the extremities towards the margin, prominent, and of a brownish colour beneath. When 
bruised, the leaves are slightly aromatic. The flowers are present at the same time with the fruit, in 
axillary, subumbellate racemes, and are supported on smooth, subclavate foot-stalks, each pedicle or flower- 
stalk having a quickly deciduous bractea at the summit. The stamineous flowers are from three to five or 
more on a peduncle. The perianth is single, urceolate, petaloid, and not inaptly compared by Rumphius to 
the flower of the Lily of the Valley, which it resembles in size and form ; it is of a thick fleshy texture, 
clothed with a very indistinct pubescence, of a dingy pale yellowish colour, and cut into three, rarely into 
four erecto-patent teeth at the extremity. 
According to Dr. Ainslie, the nutmeg-tree has of late years been cultivated at Batavia, Sumatra, and 
Penang. An inferior and long-shaped kind of nutmeg is common in the island of Borneo, and there is a 
wild sort (cat jadicai) frequently to be met with in the woods of southern India, especially in Canara, which 
Dr. Buchanan thinks might be greatly improved by cultivation. 
The nutmeg has been supposed to be the Kw^aKov of Theophrastus, but there seems little foundation for 
this opinion ; nor can it with more probability be affirmed to be the xP La ’ 0 ft a ^ av °s of Galen. Our first 
knowledge of the nutmeg, as well as the clove, was evidently derived from the Arabians, long before the East 
India Islands were discovered by the Portuguese. By Avicenna, who flourished about the year 1160, it 
was called Jiansiban or Jamiban , which signifies Nnt oj Banda. 
In 1602, the Dutch, having subjected the original inhabitants, were the first European occupiers of 
the Banda isles. In 1609, they entered into a treaty with the Oraucais or natives, who bound themselves 
to send all their nutmegs and mace to the Dutch fort of Nassau, in the island of Nera, at a fixed price, while 
the Dutch pledged themselves to defend the natives against enemies, and particularly against the Portuguese. 
The breach of this agreement by the natives, and the murder of the Dutch commissary, occasioned hostili- 
ties between the two powers. In 1616, a similar treaty was entered into with the English, who were then 
at war with the Dutch ; but this also was broken by the inhabitants of Banda. The English having refused, 
after they had made peace with the Dutch, to join them in the reduction of the Banda isles, the latter 
attacked them in 1621, and compelled the natives to deliver up their towns, their forts, their arms, and all 
their islands. In order to secure to themselves the nutmegs and mace which these islands produced, the 
Dutch erected forts in all of them, and divided the soil into orchards, which they distributed among the 
Dutch colonists in proportion to the number of their slaves. The Banda isles were taken from the Dutch 
by the English Admiral Ranier in 1796, and in 1H01 were restored to them by the treaty of Amiens. 
When crops of spice have been superabundant, and the price likely, in consequence, to be reduced, the 
same contracted spirit has actuated the Dutch to destroy immense quantities of the fruit, rather than suffer 
the markets to be lowered. A Hollander, who had returned from the Spice Islands, informed Sir William 
Temple, that, at one time he saw three piles of nutmegs burnt, each of which was more than a church of 
ordinary dimensions could hold. In 1/60 M. Beaumare witnessed at Amsterdam, near the Admiralty, the 
destruction, by fire, of a mass of spice, which was valued at one million of livres, and an equal quantity was 
condemned to be burnt on the day following : and Mr. Wilcocks, the translator of Stavorinus’s Travels 
