Diamond Hunter: Tavenier in India II - Articles of Merchandise Page 30



18	SHELLAC	BOOK II

I shall now make some special remarks about gum-lac, sugar, opium, tobacco, and coffee. Gum-lac ¹ for the most part comes from Pegu, but it also comes from the Kingdom of Bengal ; and it is dearer in the latter place because the inhabitants of the country extract from it that beautiful scarlet colour ² which they use to dye and paint their cotton cloths. Nevertheless, the Dutch buy it to export to Persia, where it is used to produce the colour which the Persians employ in their dyes. That which remains after the colour is extracted is used only to embellish toys ³made in the lathe, of which the people are very fond, and to make sealing-wax ; and be it for the one or the other purpose, they mix whatever colour they desire with it. That which comes from Pegu is the cheapest, though it is as good as that of other countries ; what causes it to be sold cheaper is that the ants, making it there on the ground in heaps, which are sometimes the size of a cask,⁴ mix with it a quantity of dirt. or aguila has come the popular name ' eagle-wood '. There is an account of it in Royle's Illustrations, &c, and Garcia da Orta devotes his 30th Colloquy to it under the title Linaloes (251 ff.). It is described very concisely in Yule, Hobson-Jobson, 335. It is used in the manufacture of the incense-sticks from Burma, which are now well known in Europe. See Ency. Biblica, i. 120 ff. ¹ Ball has elsewhere identified theof Ktesias with shellac. (See ' Oh the Identification of the Animals and Plants of India, which were known to Early Greek Authors ', Proc. Royal Irish Academy, 2nd series, vol. ii, No. 6, p. 331, but this is not certain ; see Watt, 1054 ff. ; Ency. Biblica, i. 134 ff. The classical references are collected by Sir J. Frazer, Pausanias, iii. 548 f. In the Revue d"Ethnographie et de Sociologie, ii. 5, de Morgan points out that electrum, a compound of gold and silver, was collected from the nuggets and dust obtained by washing, and that as the process of separating the metals was unknown, the first Greek coins contained as much as fifty per cent, of silver (Sir P. Sykes, Hist, of Persia, 2nd ed. i. 99, note 2) and for an account of the production and manufacture of shellac in Bengal, see Ball, Jungle Life in India, 308 ; McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Ktesias, 70.) ² The dye consists of the bodies of the female coccus which alone secretes the lac. ³ Such as the Benares toys, nests of boxes, &c, of the present day. The coloured lac is applied in sticks to the wood surfaces as they revolve in the lathe, after which they require only to be burnished (Mukharji, Art Manufactures, 249 ; Watt, 1063). ⁴ Ball suggests that this description may be due to some confusion about white ants' nests. But he failed to find any peculiarity ascribed to the Burma lac which would explain the passage.