Never eating flesh meat by any chance, seldom or never using milk, butter, poultry, or eggs, and tasting fish but occasionally (more rarely in the interior of the island,) the non-azotised elements abound in every article he consumes with the exception of the bread-fruit, the jak, and some varieties of beans.

In their indolent and feeble stomachs these are liable to degenerate into flatulent and acrid products; but, apparently by instinct, the whole population have adopted a simple prophylactic.

Every Singhalese carries in his waistcloth an ornamented box of silver or brass, according to his means, enclosing a smaller one to hold a portion of chunam (lime obtained by the calcination of shells) whilst the larger contains the nuts of the areca and a few fresh leaves of the betel-pepper.

As inclination or habit impels, he scrapes down the nut, which abounds in catechu, and, rolling it up with a little of the lime in a betel-leaf, the whole is chewed, and finally swallowed, after provoking an extreme salivation.

No medical prescription could be more judiciously compounded to effect the desired object than this practical combination of antacid, the tonic, and carminative.
The custom is so ancient in Ceylon and in India that the Arabs and Persians who resorted to Hindustan in the eighth and ninth centuries carried back the habit to their own country; and Massoudi, the traveller of Bagdad, who wrote the account of his voyages in A.D.943, states that the chewing of betel prevailed along the southern coast of Arabia, and reached as far as Yemen and Mecca.[1] Ibn Batuta saw the betel plant at Zahfar A.D.1332, and describes it accurately as trained like a vine over a trellis of reeds, or climbing the steins of the coco-nut palm.[2] [Footnote 1: Massoudi, _Maraudj-al-Dzeheb_, as translated by REINAUD, _Memoire_ _sur l'Lede_.