The royal clove is a curious monstrosity, which formerly had a great reputation as the Caryophyllum regium, by reason of its rarity, and the curious observations which are made respecting it. It is a very small clove and is distinguished by an abnormal number of sepals and by large bracts at the base of the tubes of the calyx. The corolla and internal organs are imperfectly developed. In commerce the cloves are known and named from the places of growth and are graded in value in the order named—Penang (Fig. 3), Bencoolen (Fig. 4), Amboina (Fig. 2), Zanzibar (Fig. 1). They do not exhibit any very decided structural difference, but it takes 4,500 Penang cloves to weigh one pound and 5,000 Zanzibar for same weight. There also enters into commerce as a secondary product clove stalks and mother’s cloves, the latter being the dried ripe fruit. Cloves were one of the principal Oriental spices, being the basis of a rich trade from an early part of the Christian era, and the spice was well known to the ancients and certainly formed an article of commerce, during the Middle Ages, when Alleppo was the grand mart of Eastern trade. The Portuguese discovered cloves growing abundantly on the Molucca Islands about the year 1600 and they held possession of the principal clove trade for nearly a century. Previous to this time, cloves were brought to Europe from ports in the Mediterranean, where they had been brought by Arabians, Persians, and Egyptians. About 1605, the Portuguese were driven from the Moluccas by the Dutch, who endeavored to control the clove trade by attempting to extirpate all the clove trees growing in their native islands, and to confine the culture of the entire production to the islands of Amboina and Ternate, paying the kings of the islands of Ternate, Tidor, and Batian a tribute to permit and assist in the extirpation of the trees. In the years 1769 and 1771, the French, under M. Poivre, made two expeditions to the Moluccas and found the clove tree growing in some small islands which had been overlooked by the Dutch. From one of these (Guebi) they obtained plants and transplanted them to the Isle of France. In 1785, there were already between 10,000 and 11,000 clove trees growing in this island. At the end of the seventeenth century, an Arab carried the clove seed from Baurbou and planted the plantation in Zanzibar at Miltoni, on the road to Cheuni, and plants were conveyed from the Isle of France to Cayenne, Dominica, and to Mauritius. About 1770, the English put such a high duty on spices in Dominica that they ruined the trade there, and although M. Buee planted the clove tree there over 100 years ago, one tree is yet living.