ch. xx. p. 182).  The fact of their being found so is in itself sufficient evidence, that down to that time no active trade had been carried on in the article; and the earliest travellers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, MARCO POLO, JOHN OF HESSE, FRA JORDANUS and others, whilst they allude to cinnamon as one of the chief productions of Malabar, speak of Ceylon, notwithstanding her wealth in jewels and pearls, as if she were utterly destitute of any spice of this kind.  NICOLA DE CONTI, A.D. 1444, is the first European writer, in whose pages I have found Ceylon described as yielding cinnamon, and he is followed by Varthema, A.D. 1506, and Corsali, A.D. 1515.

Long after the arrival of Europeans in Ceylon, cinnamon was only found in the forests of the interior, where it was cut and brought away by the Chalias, the caste who, from having been originally weavers, devoted themselves to this new employment.  The Chalias are themselves an immigrant tribe, and, according to their own tradition, they came to the island only a very short time before the appearance of the Portuguese.  (See a History of the Chalias, by ADRIAN RAJAPAKSE, a Chief of the Caste, Asiat.  Reser. vol. iii. p. 440.) So difficult of access were the forests, that the Portuguese could only obtain a full supply from them once in three years; and the Dutch, to remedy this uncertainty, made regular plantations in the vicinity of their forts about the year 1770 A.D., “so that the cultivation of cinnamon in Ceylon is not yet a century old”—­COOLEY, p. 15.  It is a question for scientific research rather than for historical scrutiny, whether the cinnamon laurel of Ceylon, as it exists at the present day, is indigenous to the island, or whether it is identical with the cinnamon of Abyssinia, and may have been carried thence by the Arabs; or whether it was brought to the island from the adjacent continent of India; or imported by the Chinese from islands still further to the east.  One fact is notorious at the present day, that nearly the whole of the cinnamon grown in Ceylon is produced in a small and well-defined area occupying the S.W. quarter of the island, which has been at all times the resort of foreign shipping.  The natives, from observing its appearance for the first time in other and unexpected places, believe it to be sown by the birds who carry thither the undigested seeds; and the Dutch, for this reason, prohibited the shooting of crows,—­a precaution that would scarcely be necessary for the protection of the plant, had they believed it to be not only indigenous, but peculiar to the island.  We ourselves were led, till very recently, to imagine that Ceylon enjoyed a “natural monopoly” of cinnamon.