in which, amongst other particulars, obviously describing Ceylon under the name of “the island of Rachius,” which he states to have been visited by the Phoenicians; he says, that the western province produced, the finest cinnamon ([Greek:  kinnamo pollo te kai diapheronti]), that the mountains abounded in cassia (Greek:  kasia aromatikotate]), and that the minor kings paid their tribute in both, to the paramount sovereign.  (SANCHONIATHON, ed.  Wagenfeld, Bremen, 1837, lib. vii. ch. xii.).  The MS. from which Wagenfeld printed, is evidently a mediaeval forgery (see note (A) to vol. i. ch. v. p. 547).  Again, it is equally strange that the writers of Arabia and Persia preserve a similar silence as to the cinnamon of the island, although they dwell with due admiration on its other productions, in all of which they carried on a lucrative trade.  Sir WILLIAM OUSELEY, after a fruitless search through the writings of their geographers and travellers, records his surprise at this result, and mentions especially his disappointment, that Ferdousi, who enriches his great poem with glowing descriptions of all the objects presented by surrounding nations to the sovereigns of Persia,—­ivory, ambergris, and aloes, vases, bracelets, and jewels,—­never once adverts to the exquisite cinnamon of Ceylon.—­Travels, vol. i, p. 41.

The conclusion deducible from fifteen centuries of historic testimony is, that the earliest knowledge of cinnamon possessed by the western nations was derived from China, and that it first reached Judea and Phoenicia overland by way of Persia (Song of Solomon, iv. 14:  Revelation xviii, 13).  At a later period when the Arabs, “the merchants of Sheba,” competed for the trade of Tyre, and earned to her “the chief of all spices” (Ezekiel xvii. 22), their supplies were drawn from their African possessions, and the cassia of the Troglodytic coast supplanted the cinnamon of the far East, and to a great extent excluded it from the market.  The Greeks having at length discovered the secret of the Arabs, resorted to the same countries as their rivals in commerce, and surpassing them in practical navigation and the construction of ships, the Sabaeans were for some centuries reduced to a state of mercantile dependence and inferiority.  In the meantime the Roman Empire declined; the Persians under the Sassanides engrossed the intercourse with the East, the trade of India now flowed through the Persian Gulf, and the ports of the Red Sea were deserted.  “Thus the downfall, and it may be the extinction, of the African spice trade probably dates from the close of the sixth century, and Malabar succeeded at once to this branch of commerce.”—­COOLEY, Regio Cinnamomifera, p. 14.  Cooley supposes that the Malabars may have obtained from Ceylon the cinnamon with which they supplied the Persians; as Ibn Batuta, in the fourteenth century, saw cinnamon trees drifted upon the shores of the island, whither they had been carried by torrents from the forests of the interior (Ibn Batuta,