SUFEENA, s. Hind. safīna. This is the native corr. of subpoena. It is shaped, but not much distorted, by the existence in Hind. of the Ar. word safīna for 'a blank-book, a note-book.'

SUGAR, s. This familiar word is of Skt. origin. Sarkara originally signifies 'grit or gravel,' thence crystallised sugar, and through a Prakrit form sakkara gave the Pers. shakkar, the Greek σάκχαρ and σάκχαρον, and the late Latin saccharum. The Ar. is sukkar, or with the article as-sukkar, and it is probable that our modern forms, It. zucchero and succhero, Fr. sucre, Germ. Zucker, Eng. sugar, came as well as the Sp. azucar, and Port. assucar, from the Arabic direct, and not through Latin or Greek. The Russian is sakhar; Polish zukier; Hung. zukur. In fact the ancient knowledge of the product was slight and vague, and it was by the Arabs that the cultivation of the sugar-cane was introduced into Egypt, Sicily, and Andalusia. It is possible indeed, and not improbable, that palm-sugar (see [JAGGERY]) is a much older product than that of the cane. [This is disputed by Watt (Econ. Dict. vi. pt. i. p. 31), who is inclined to fix the home of the cane in E. India.] The original habitat of the cane is not known; there is only a slight and doubtful statement of Loureiro, who, in speaking of Cochin-China, uses the words "habitat et colitur," which may imply its existence in a wild state, as well as under cultivation, in that country. De Candolle assigns its earliest production to the country extending from Cochin-China to Bengal.

Though, as we have said, the knowledge which the ancients had of sugar was very dim, we are disposed greatly to question the thesis, which has been so confidently maintained by Salmasius and later writers, that the original saccharon of Greek and Roman writers was not sugar but the siliceous concretion sometimes deposited in bamboos, and used in medieval medicine under the name [tabasheer] (q.v.) (where see a quotation from Royle, taking the same view). It is just possible that Pliny in the passage quoted below may have jumbled up two different things, but we see no sufficient evidence even of this. In White's Latin Dict. we read that by the word saccharon is meant (not sugar but) "a sweet juice distilling from the joints of the bamboo." This is nonsense. There is no such sweet juice distilled from the joints of the bamboo; nor is the substance tabashīr at all sweet. On the contrary it is slightly bitter and physicky in taste, with no approach to sweetness. It is a hydrate of silica. It could never have been called "honey" (see Dioscorides and Pliny below); and the name of bamboo-sugar appears to have been given it by the Arabs merely because of some resemblance of its concretions to lumps of sugar. [The same view is taken in the Encycl. Brit. 9th ed. xxii. 625, quoting Not. et Extr., xxv. 267.] All the erroneous notices of σάκχαρον seem to be easily accounted for by lack of knowledge; and they are exactly paralleled by the loose and inaccurate stories about the origin of camphor, of lac, and what-not, that may be found within the boards of this book.

In the absence or scarcity of sugar, honey was the type of sweetness, and hence the name of honey applied to sugar in several of these early extracts. This phraseology continued down to the Middle Ages, at least in its application to uncrystallised products of the sugar-cane, and analogous substances. In the quotation from Pegolotti we apprehend that his three kinds of honey indicate honey, treacle, and a syrup or treacle made from the sweet pods of the carob-tree.

Sugar does not seem to have been in early Chinese use. The old Chinese books often mention shi-mi or 'stone-honey' as a product of India and Persia. In the reign of Taitsung (627-650) a man was sent to Gangetic India to learn the art of sugar-making; and Marco Polo below mentions the introduction from Egypt of the further art of refining it. In India now, Chīnī ([Cheeny]) (Chinese) is applied to the whiter kinds of common sugar; Miṣrī ([Misree]) or Egyptian, to sugar-candy; loaf-sugar is called ḳand.

c. A.D. 60.—

"Quâque ferens rapidum diviso gurgite fontem

Vastis Indus aquis mixtum non sentit Hydaspen:

Quique bibunt tenerâ dulcis ab arundine succos...."

Lucan, iii. 235.