NOTE 3.—­The tree here intended, and which gives the chief supply of toddy and sugar in the Malay Islands, is the Areng Saccharifera (from the Javanese name), called by the Malays Gomuti, and by the Portuguese Saguer.  It has some resemblance to the date-palm, to which Polo compares it, but it is a much coarser and wilder-looking tree, with a general raggedness, “incompta et adspectu tristis,” as Rumphius describes it.  It is notable for the number of plants that find a footing in the joints of its stem.  On one tree in Java I have counted thirteen species of such parasites, nearly all ferns.  The tree appears in the foreground of the cut at p. 273.

Crawford thus describes its treatment in obtaining toddy:  “One of the spathae, or shoots of fructification, is, on the first appearance of the fruit, beaten for three successive days with a small stick, with the view of determining the sap to the wounded part.  The shoot is then cut off, a little way from the root, and the liquor which pours out is received in pots....  The Gomuti palm is fit to yield toddy at 9 or 10 years old, and continues to yield it for 2 years at the average rate of 3 quarts a day.” (Hist. of Ind.  Arch. I. 398.)

The words omitted in translation are unintelligible to me:  “et sunt quatre raimes trois cel en.” (G.T.)

["Polo’s description of the wine-pots of Samara hung on the trees ’like date-palms,’ agrees precisely with the Chinese account of the shu theu tsiu made from ‘coir trees like cocoa-nut palms’ manufactured by the Burmese.  Therefore it seems more likely that Samara is Siam (still pronounced Shumuro in Japan, and Siamlo in Hakka), than Sumatra.” (Parker, China Review, XIV. p. 359.) I think it useless to discuss this theory.—­H.C.]

NOTE 4.—­No one has been able to identify this state.  Its position, however, must have been near PEDIR, and perhaps it was practically the same.  Pedir was the most flourishing of those Sumatran states at the appearance of the Portuguese.

Rashiduddin names among the towns of the Archipelago Dalmian, which may perhaps be a corrupt transcript of Dagroian.

Mr. Phillips’s Chinese extracts, already cited, state that west of Sumatra (proper) were two small kingdoms, the first Naku-urh, the second Liti.  Naku-urh, which seems to be the Ting-’ho-’rh of Pauthier’s extracts, which sent tribute to the Kaan, and may probably be Dagroian as Mr. Phillips supposes, was also called the Kingdom of Tattooed Folk.