Lemon-juice was employed at Ceylon as protection against the numberless land-leeches that seized upon the bare legs of the natives in the lowlands (Ibn Batouta, _Lee edition_, 188; Knox, _Hist. of Ceylon_, etc., I, iv, 49), precisely the sort of country where the vine pepper—Piper nigrum—grows to best advantage, viz., on level ground along the banks of rivers and rivulets (Simmonds, _Tropl. Agriculture_, 476). In his notice on “Sylan”, Friar Oderic says that the people who dive into a lake infested with horse-leeches, for the purpose of recovering precious stones, “take lemons, which they peel, anointing themselves thoroughly with the juice thereof, that so they may dive naked under the water, the horse-leeches not being able to hurt them” (Hakluyt _Voyages_, ii, 160). Sir Emerson Tennent quotes Oderic, and distinguishes the land- from the cattle-leech. The former, so inimical to man, never visits ponds or streams, but is found in the lower ranges of hill country kept damp by frequent showers; it attains a length of two inches (_Natural History of Ceylon_, Chap. xiii). There is strange confusion, in associating the use to which the lemon is put, in Ceylon, with the pepper-growing country of Malabar by no means famous for leeches.—ED. CHAPTER XLIII. (1.) “those from Venice likewise.”—In his admirable treatise on the establishment of Italian commercial depôts in Egypt, Heyd (_d. Ital. Handelscolon._, etc., in the _Zeitschrift f. d. gesammte Staatswissenschaft_, xx, 54–138) confirms the statement that of the several Italian Powers, the Venetians and Genoese were at that time the most interested in trade with Alexandria. Their predecessors the Pisans, who had taken an active part in the eastern trade, were forced at the commencement of the 15th century to abandon their interests in favour of the Florentines, and in great measure also of the Anconitans, Neapolitans, and citizens of Gaeta; but the Catalans, equally with the Italians, kept up extensive commercial relations with Egypt.—BRUUN. (2.) “the king of Zipern.”—Allusion is made to the taking of Alexandria, Oct. 10th, 1365, by Peter of Lusignan, king of Cyprus, and his allies the Genoese, Venetians, and knights of Rhodes. De Lannoy (_Voy. et Ambass._, 70) records that the allied forces landed near the old port, the entrance to which was ever afterwards closed against all vessels of Christian nationalities. Upon the approach of the Egyptians on the above occasion, the Franks re-embarked after having pillaged the city and carried off five thousand captives (Weil, _Gesch. der Chal._, iv, 512). This expedition, in which twenty-four Venetian, two Genoese, ten Rhodian, five French, and several Cyprian vessels took part, was completed in the space of a week, so that allowing the requisite time for landing and re-embarking, the occupation of the city would most probably have lasted three days, the period indicated by Schiltberger.—BRUUN.