1616.—"Some small quantitie of Wine, but not common, is made among them; they call it Raack, distilled from Sugar and a spicie Rinde of a Tree called Iagra [[Jaggery]]."—Terry, in Purchas, ii. 1470.
1622.—"We'll send him a jar of rack by next conveyance."—Letter in Sainsbury, iii. 40.
1627.—"Java hath been fatal to many of the English, but much through their own distemper with Rack."—Purchas, Pilgrimage, 693.
1848.—"Jos ... finally insisted upon having a bowl of rack punch.... That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history."—Vanity Fair, ch. vi.
ARSENAL, s. An old and ingenious etymology of this word is arx navalis. But it is really Arabic. Hyde derives it from tars-khānah, 'domus terroris,' contracted into tarsānah, the form (as he says) used at Constantinople (Syntagma Dissertt., i. 100). But it is really the Ar. dār-al-ṣinā'a, 'domus artificii,' as the quotations from Mas'ūdī clearly show. The old Ital. forms darsena, darsinale corroborate this, and the Sp. ataraçana, which is rendered in Ar. by Pedro de Alcala, quoted by Dozy, as dar a cinaa.—(See details in Dozy, Oosterlingen, 16-18.)
A.D. 943-4.—"At this day in the year of the Hijra 332, Rhodes (Rodas) is an arsenal (dār-ṣinā'a) where the Greeks build their war-vessels."—Mas'ūdī, ii. 423. And again "dār-ṣinā'at al marākib," 'an arsenal of ships,' iii. 67.
1573.—"In this city (Fez) there is a very great building which they call Daraçana, where the Christian captives used to labour at blacksmith's work and other crafts under the superintendence and orders of renegade headmen ... here they made cannon and powder, and wrought swords, cross-bows, and arquebusses."—Marmol, Desc. General de Affrica, lib. iii. f. 92.
1672.—"On met au Tershana deux belles galères à l'eau."—Antoine Galland, Journ., i. 80.
ART, EUROPEAN. We have heard much, and justly, of late years regarding the corruption of Indian art and artistic instinct by the employment of the artists in working for European patrons, and after European patterns. The copying of such patterns is no new thing, as we may see from this passage of the brightest of writers upon India whilst still under Asiatic government.
c. 1665.—"... not that the Indians have not wit enough to make them successful in Arts, they doing very well (as to some of them) in many parts of India, and it being found that they have inclination enough for them, and that some of them make (even without a Master) very pretty workmanship and imitate so well our work of Europe, that the difference thereof will hardly be discerned."—Bernier, E. T., 81-82 [ed. Constable, 254].