The custom is so ancient in Ceylon and in India that the Arabs and Persians who resorted to Hindustan in the eighth and ninth centuries carried back the habit to their own country; and Massoudi, the traveller of Bagdad, who wrote the account of his voyages in A.D. 943, states that the chewing of betel prevailed along the southern coast of Arabia, and reached as far as Yemen and Mecca.[1] Ibn Batuta saw the betel plant at Zahfar A.D. 1332, and describes it accurately as trained like a vine over a trellis of reeds, or climbing the steins of the coco-nut palm.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Massoudi, Maraudj-al-Dzeheb, as translated by REINAUD, Memoire sur l’Lede. p. 230.]

[Footnote 2:  Voyages, &c. t. ii. p. 205.]

The leaves of the coca[1] supply the Indians of Bolivia and Peru with a stimulant, whose use is equivalent to that of the betel-pepper among the natives of Hindustan and the Eastern Archipelago.  With an admixture of lime, they are chewed perseveringly; but, unlike the betel, the colour imparted by them to the saliva is greenish, instead of red.  It is curious, too, as a coincidence common to the humblest phases of semi-civilised life, that, in the absence of coined money, the leaves of the coca form a rude kind of currency in the Andes, as does the betel in some parts of Ceylon, and tobacco amongst the tribes of the south-west of Africa.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Erythroxylon coca.]

[Footnote 2:  Tobacco was a currency in North America when Virginia was colonised in the early part of the 17th century; debts were contracted and paid in it, and in every ordinary transaction tobacco answered the purposes of coin.]

Neither catechu nor its impure equivalent, “terra japonica,” is prepared from the areca in Ceylon; but the nuts are exported in large quantities to the Maldive Islands and to India, the produce of which they excel both in astringency and size.  The fibrous wood of the areca being at once straight, firm, and elastic, is employed for making the pingoes (yokes for the shoulders), by means of which the Singhalese coolie, like the corresponding class among the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks, carries his burdens, dividing them into portions of equal weight, one of which is suspended from each end of the pingo.  By a swaying motion communicated to them as he starts, his own movement is facilitated, whereas one unaccustomed to the work, by allowing the oscillation to become irregular, finds it almost impossible to proceed with a load of any considerable weight.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The natives of Tahti use a yoke of the same form as the Singhalese pingo, but made from the wood of the Hibiscus tiliaceus.—­DARWIN, Nat.  Voy. ch. xviii. p. 407.  For a further account of the pingo see Vol.  I. Part iv. ch. viii. p. 497.]