Page:Indian Medicinal Plants (Text Part 1).djvu/563

Rh red streaks ; heart-wood with an irregular outline, and radiating ramifications, very durable. Leaves abruptly pinnate, with 20-40, glabrescent, close, obtuse, opposite, oblong leaflets. Racemes copious, lax at the end of branchlets, with 10-15 flowers together. Pedicels articulated at the base of the Calyx. Bracts boatshaped, enclosing buds, caducous. Calyx-tube turbinate, segments 4. Petals 3, under ½in. long, unequal, variegated with red and yellow, the 2 lower reduced to scales, perfect stamens 3, filaments united to the middle of the anthers, oblong, versatile. Ovary stipitate, the stalk adnate to Calyx-tube. Pod thick, filled when mature with dark brown acid pulp transversed by fibres. 3-8in. long, lin. or more broad, 3-10-seeded. Seeds brown, shining, without albumen, the outer coat producing abundant mucilage, when steeped in water for a time.

Most authors make two species of Tamarindus, the Indian kind, with long pods, and the West Indian, with short pods; bat even those who adopt this view of the subject generally raise a question of their specific identity. India is probably the aboriginal country of both, whence the species was introduced into West Indies. Even in the East the Tamarinds of the Archipelago are considered the best of those of India. The Arabs called the tree Tamr-i-hindee, or Indian Date, from which has been derived the generic name, Tamarindus. The inhabitants of the East have a notion that it is dangerous to sleep under the tree, and it has been remarked, as of our Beech in Europe, that the ground beneath is always bare, and that no plant seems to thrive under its branches.*

In the East, the pulpy fruits of the Tamarind are preserved without sugar, being merely dried in the sun and cured in salt. In the West Indies, the pulp is usually packed in small kegs between layers of sugar, and hot syrup is poured on the whole. In order to enable them to keep without fermentation for a length of time, the first syrup, which is very acid,


 * Apropos of this remark it may here be observed that the Bhangi or sweeper of the Santa Cruz Station, B. B. and C. I. Railway, has his sleeping- hut under a group of 5 or 6 tamarind trees, huge and shady, where for the last 20 years the hut has been in use (K, R, KIRTIKAR).