Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/621

Rh to Ireland, and commanded a body of Dutch cavalry at the battle of the Boyne. On the king’s return to England General Ginckell was entrusted with the conduct of the war. He took the ﬁeld in the spring of 1691, and established his headquarters at Mullingar. Among those who held a command under him was the marquis of l’tuvigny, the recognized chief of the Huguenot refugees. Early in June Ginckell took the fortress of Ballymore, capturing the whole garrison of 1000 men. The English lost only 8 men. After reconstructing the fortiﬁcations of Ballymore, the army marched to Athlone, then one of the most important of the fortiﬁed towns of Ireland. The Irish defenders of the place were commanded by a distinguished French general, Saint-Ruth. The ﬁring began on June 19th, and on the 30th the town was stormed, the Irish army retreating towards Galway, and taking up their position at Aghrim. Having strengthened the fortiﬁcations of Athlone and left a garrison there, Ginckell led the English, on July 12th, to Aghrim. An immediate attack was resolved on, and, after a severe and at one time doubtful contest, the crisis was precipitated by the fall of Saint-Ruth, and the disorganized Irish were defeated and ﬂed. A horrible slaughter of the Irish followed the struggle, and 4000 corpses were left unburied on the ﬁeld, besides a multitude of others that lay along the line of the retreat. Galway next capitulated, its garrison being permitted to retire to Limerick. There the viceroy, Tyrconuel, was in command of a large force, but his sudden death early in August left the command in the hands of General Sarsﬁeld and the Frenchman D'UsSon. The English army came in sight of the town on the day of Tyi‘connel’s death, and the bombardment was immediately begun. Ginckell, by a bold device, crossed the Shannon and captured the camp of the Irish cavalry. A few days later he stormed the fort on Thomond liridge, and after ditlicult negotiations a capitulation was signed, the terms of which were divided into a civil and a military treaty. Thus was completed the conquest or paciﬁcation of Ireland, and the services of the Dutch general were amply recognized and rewarded. He received the formal thanks of the House of Commons, and was created by the king first earl of Athlone and baron of Aghrim. ' The immense forfeited estates of the earl of Limerick were given to him, but the grant was a few years l-iter revoked by the English parliament. The earl con- tinued to serve in the English army, and accompanied the king to the Continent in 1693. He fought at Landon, and assisted in destroying the French magazine at Givet. In 1702 he took command of the Dutch serving under the duke of Marlborough. He died at Utrecht, February 10, 1 705. On the death of the ninth earl without issue in 1844, the title became extinct.  GINGER (French, Gingembre; German, Ingwer), the rhizome or underground stem of Zingiber ofﬁcinale, Roscoe, a perennial reed—like plant growing from 3 tO-d: feet high. The ﬂowers and leaves are borne on separate stems, those of the former being shorter than those of the latter, and averaging from 6 to 12 inches. The ﬂowers themselves are borne at the apex of the stems in dense ovate oblong cone-like spikes from 2 to 3 inches long, Composed of obtuse strongly-imbricated bracts with membranous margins, each bract enclosing a single small sessile ﬂower. The leaves are alternate, bright green, smooth, tapering at both ends, with very short petioles. The plant, though unknown in a wild state, is considered with very good reason to be a native of the warmer parts of Asia, over which it has been culti- vated from an early period, and the rhizome imported into England. From Asia the plant has spread into the West Indies, South America, western tropical Africa, and Australia. The use of ginger as a spice has been known from very early times ; it was supposed by the Greeks and Romans to be a product of southern Arabia, and was received by them by way of the Red Sea ; in India it has also been known from a very remote period, the Greek and Latin names being derived from the Sanskrit. Fliickiger and I-Ianbury, in their I’Iaarmacograp/tia, give the following notes on the history of ginger. On the authority of Vincent’s Commerce and Navigation oft/ac Ancients, it is stated that in the list of imports from the Red Sea into Alexandria, which in the second century of our era were there liable to the Roman ﬁscal duty, ginger occurs among other Indian spices. So frequent is the mention of ginger in similar lists during the Middle Ages, that it evidently constituted an important item in the commerce between Europe and the East. It thus appears in the tariff of duties levied at Acre in Palestine about, in that of Barcelona in , Marseilles in , and Paris in. Ginger seems to have been well known in England even before the Norman Conquest, being often referred to in the Anglo-Saxon leech-books of the . It was very common in the and, ranking next in value to pepper, which was then the commonest of all spices, and costing on an average about 1s. 7d. per lb. Three kinds of ginger were known among the merchants of Italy about the middle of the :—(1) Belledi or Balarli, an Arabic name, which, as applied to ginger, would signify country or wild, and denotes common ginger; Colombz'uo, which refers to Columbum, Kolam, or Quilon, a port in Travancore, fre- quently mentioned in the Middle Ages ; and (3) Illz'cc/zz'no, a name which denoted that the spice had been brought from or by way of Mecca. Marco Polo seems to have seen the ginger plant both in India and China between and . John of Montecorvino, a missionary friar who visited India about, gives a description of the plant, and refers to the fact of the root being dug up and trans- ported. Nicolo di Conto, a Venetian merchant in the, also describes the plant and the collection of the root, as seen by him in India. Though the Venetians received ginger by way of Egypt, some of the superior kinds were taken from India overland by the Black Sea. The Spice is said to have been introduced into America by Francisco de )Iendoga, who took it from the East Indies to New Spain. It seems to have been shipped for commercial purposes from San Domingo as early as, and from Barbados in 1654; so early as considerable quantities were sent from the West Indies to Spain. Ginger is known in commerce in two distinct forms, termed respectively coated and uncoated ginger, as having or wanting the epidermis. For the ﬁrst, the pieces, which are called “races” or “hands,” from their irregular palmate form, are washed and simply dried in the sun. In this form ginger presents a brown, more or less irregularly wrinkled or striated surface, and when broken shows a dark brownish fracture, hard, and sometimes horny and resinous. To produce uncoated ginger the rhizomes are washed, scraped, and sun—dried, and are often subjected to a system of bleaching, either from the fumes of burning sulphur or by immersion for a short time in a solution of chlorinated lime. The whitewashed appearance that much of the ginger has, as seen in the shops, is due to the fact of its being washed in whiting and water, or even coated with sulphate of lime. This artiﬁcial coating is supposed by some to give the ginger a better appearance; it often, however, covers an inferior quality, and can readily be detected by the ease with which it rubs off, or by its leaving a white powdery substance at the bottom of the jar in which it is contained. Uncoated ginger, as seen in trade, varies from single Jomts an inch or less in length to ﬂattish irregularly branched pieces of several joints, the “ races” or “ hands,” and from 3 to 4 inches long; each branch has a depression at its