VINCENT, in scrutinising the writings of the classical authors, anterior to Cosmas, who treated of Taprobane, was surprised to discover that no mention of cinnamon as a production of Ceylon was to be met with in Pliny, Dioscorides, or Ptolemy, and that even the author of the mercantile Periplus was silent regarding it. (Vol. ii. p. 512.) D’Herbelot has likewise called attention to the same fact. (Bibl.  Orient. vol. iii. p. 308.) This omission is not to be explained by ascribing it to mere inadvertence.  The interest of the Greeks and Romans was naturally excited to discover the country which produced a luxury so rare as to be a suitable gift for a king; and so costly, that a crown of cinnamon tipped with gold was a becoming offering to the gods.  But the Arabs succeeded in preserving the secret of its origin, and the curiosity of Europe was baffled by tales of cinnamon being found in the nest of the Phoenix, or gathered in marshes guarded by monsters and winged serpents.  Pliny appears to have been the first to suspect that the most precious of spices came not from Arabia, but from AEthiopia (lib. xii. c. xlii.); and COOLEY, in an argument equally remarkable for ingenuity and research, has succeeded in demonstrating the soundness of this conjecture, and establishing the fact that the cinnamon brought to Europe by the Arabs, and afterwards by the Greeks, came chiefly from the eastern angle of Africa, the tract around Cape Gardafui, which is marked on the ancient maps as the Regio Cinnamomifera. (Journ.  Roy.  Georg.  Society, 1849, vol. xix. p. 166.) COOLEY has suggested in his learned work on “Ptolemy and the Nile,” that the name Gardafui is a compound of the Somali word gard, “a port,” and the Arabic afhaoni, a generic term for aromata and spices.  It admits of no doubt that the cinnamon of Ceylon was unknown to commerce in the sixth century of our era; although there is evidence of a supply which, if not from China, was probably carried in Chinese vessels at a much earlier period, in the Persian name dar chini, which means “Chinese wood,” and in the ordinary word “cinn-amon,” “Chinese amomum,” a generic name for aromatic spices generally. (NEES VON ESENBACH, de Cinnamono Disputatio, p. 12.) Ptolemy, equally with Pliny, placed the “Cinnamon Region” at the north-eastern extremity of Africa, now the country of the Somaulees; and the author of the Periplus, mindful of his object, in writing a guidebook for merchant-seamen, particularises cassia amongst the exports of the same coast; but although he enumerates the productions of Ceylon, gems, pearls, ivory, and tortoiseshell, he is silent as to cinnamon.  Dioscorides and Galen, in common with the travellers and geographers of the ancients, ignore its Singhalese origin, and unite with them in tracing it to the country of the Troglodytae.  I attach no importance to those passages in WAGENFELD’S version of Sanchoniathon,