As a spice, ginger was used among the early Greeks and Romans, who appear to have received it by way of the Red sea, inasmuch as they considered it to be a production of southern Arabia. In the list of imports from the Red sea into Alexandra which, in the 2nd century of our era, were then liable to the Roman fiscal duty, ginger occurs among other Indian spices. It appears in the tariff of duties levied at Acre in Palestine, about 1173, in that of Barcelona in 1221, Marseilles in 1228 and Paris 1296. It was known in England before the Norman conquest, being frequently named in the Anglo-Saxon leech-books of the 11th century as well as in the Welsh “Physicians of Myddvai.” During the 13th and 14th centuries, it was, next to pepper, the commonest of spices, costing on an average 1s 7d per lb., or about the price of a sheep. Three kinds of ginger were known to Italian merchants about the 14th century: (1) Belledi of Baladi, an Arabic name which applied to ginger would signify country, wild, and denotes common ginger; (2) Columbonio, which refers to Columbuno, Kolam or Quilon, a port in Travanore, frequently referred to in the middle ages; (3) Micchino, which denotes brot from or by way of Mecca. Marco Polo saw it in India and China, 1230–1239. John of Montecorvino, a missionary friar, who visited India in 1290, gives a description of the plant and refers to the root being dug up and transplanted. Nicolo de Conti, a Venetian merchant, early in the 15th century describes the plant and a collection of roots he saw in India. The Venetians received it by way of Egypt, and superior kinds from India overland by the Black sea. Ginger was introduced into America by Francisco de Mondoca, who took it from the East Indies to New Spain. It was shipped for commercial purposes from the islands of St. Domingo in 1585, and from Barbadoes in 1654. [Illustration] Ginger is the dried, knotty fibrous rhizomes or tubers--“races” or “hands” as they are called from their irregular, palmate form--of the ginger plant (zinziber officinale) the real roots being the thin fibers that branch off from the rhizomes.