Note 39 — Chapter III

Tapissendis is a general name given to the cotton stuffs procured from India. They are partly painted and partly printed with wooden blocks. Gingam is properly the name given to those cotton stuffs which come from Bengal and the coast of Coromandel. They are distinguished by this particular circumstance, that a thread made from the bark of a tree is interwoven with the cotton. A.

This information respecting the difference between the Tapissendis and Gingams is new. It is, however, a pity that the author did not give the name of the tree which produces the bark employed in manufacturing the latter. Had he made it known, he would have deserved thanks from all naturalists and technologists.—In Madagascar, the inhabitants of the sea-coast manufacture, from the long leaves of a tree called by them Vattulala, but which is no farther known to botanists, a kind of very strong stuffs, sometimes as fine as the best camblet, and frequently employed by the women at the Cape of Good Hope to make under-petticoats. F.