Every Singhalese carries in his waistcloth an ornamented box of silver or brass, according to his means, enclosing a smaller one to hold a portion of chunam (lime obtained by the calcination of shells) whilst the larger contains the nuts of the areca and a few fresh leaves of the betel-pepper. As inclination or habit impels, he scrapes down the nut, which abounds in catechu, and, rolling it up with a little of the lime in a betel-leaf, the whole is chewed, and finally swallowed, after provoking an extreme salivation. No medical prescription could be more judiciously compounded to effect the desired object than this practical combination of antacid, the tonic, and carminative. 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, _Mémoire_ _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.]