PIPPER. 
289 
ancient Greeks; as a medicine it was also early known, being employed as such by 
Hippocrates. We quote the following interesting paragraph from Simmonds’s ‘ Com¬ 
mercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom’:—“Pliny, the naturalist, states that the 
price of pepper in the market of Rome in his time was, in English money, 9s. 4 d. per 
pound, and thus we have the price of pepper at least 1774 years ago. The pepper 
alluded to must have been the produce of Malabar, the nearest part of India to Europe 
that produced the article, and its prime cost could not have exceeded the present one, or 
about 2d. per pound. It would most probably have come to Europe by crossing the 
Indian and Arabian Ocean with the easterly monsoon, sailing up the Red Sea, crossing 
the Desert, dropping down the Nile, and making its way along the Mediterranean by 
two-thirds of its whole length. This voyage, which in our time can be performed in a 
month, most probably then took eighteen. Transit and customs duties must have been 
paid over and over again, and there must have been plenty of extortion. All this will 
explain how pepper could not be sold in the Roman market under fifty-six times its 
prime cost. Immediately previous to the discovery of the route to India by the Cape of 
Good Hope, we find that the price of pepper in the markets of Europe had fallen to Gs. 
a pound, or 3s. 4 d. less than in the time of Pliny. What probably contributed to this 
fall was the superior skill in navigation of the now converted Arabs, and the extension 
to the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, which abounded in pepper. After the great 
discovery of Vasco de Gama, the price of pepper fell to about Is. ‘3d. a pound, a fall of 
8s. Id. from the time of Pliny, and of 4s. 9 d. from that of the Mahomedan Arabs, Turks, 
and Venetians.” The pepper plant (Piper nigrum , L.) is a native 'of the coast of 
Malabar and the southern parts of India, but is now largely cultivated in the East and 
West Indies, Sumatra, Borneo, Siam, and other places within the tropics. It is a 
perennial with a climbing, shrubby stem ; the berries or fruit are borne upon a spadix 
that is arranged in dense clusters round a central stalk, each of these spadices contain 
from twenty to fifty berries. The propagation of the pepper plant is chiefly by cuttings, 
though they will grow well from seed, but of course the plants take longer time before 
they come into bearing, which is a great consideration when pecuniary profit is the aim. 
The richer the soil, the better the plants thrive. In forming a plantation, the grower 
will take his cuttings and plant them perhaps from 7 to 12 feet apart. The climbing 
habit of the plants renders it necessary to provide some support for them to trail upon. 
Each individual plant is supplied with some kind of prop, but in many plantations these 
supports are cuttings of some spiny or thorny tree, which, striking in the ground and 
throwing out its leaves above, furnishes at once both a support and shelter for the young 
pepper plant. If grown on a rich soil the plants will bear fruit in a small proportion 
even in the first year, increasing their produce annually till the end of the fifth year, 
when they yield about eight or ten pounds per plant, and this is about the average* pro¬ 
duce up to fifteen or twenty years, after which the plants begin to decline, seldom or 
ever surviving beyond the thirtieth year. A pepper plantation has a peculiar yet 
picturesque appearance, the regular intervals between the plants and the plants them¬ 
selves carefully trained against their props, gives to it an air of remarkable uniformity 
seldom seen in the cultivation of other crops. The plants, which, on account of their 
climbing habits are technically called pepper “vines,” are allowed to run up their sup¬ 
ports to a height of 3 or 4 feet; the tops are then bent down to the ground, and the 
young shoots which spring from these are tended with great care and neatly trained up¬ 
wards. The plantations in Sumatra are said to be models of neatness and cleanliness, 
all weeds and refuse being carefully removed. The fruits when first formed are green, 
changing to red, and finally to black. When they make their first change from green 
to red, they are considered fit for gathering, for if left longer on the plants they are apt 
to drop off, besides losing a portion of their pungency. After gathering, the berries are 
spread on mats and exposed to the sun to dry; they are then rubbed between the hands 
to remove the short stalks. This constitutes black pepper, but both black and white 
pepper are the produce of the same plant, with this difference that the white is the 
largest picked berries, gathered at the fullest state of maturity, and denuded of its black 
outer husk by soaking in water. White pepper, as we all know, fetches a higher price 
in the market than black, not on account of its greater pungency, for, as we have seen, 
it has less, losing, as it does, much of that most important principle in the husk of which 
it is deprived, and also in the process of steeping and bleaching. A good story is told 
in Mr. Cameron’s new book upon ‘ Our Malayan Possessions,’ illustrating the ignorance 
