[c. 1665.—"He spared also the house of a deceased Delale or Gentile broker, of the Dutch."—Bernier, ed. Constable, 188. In the first English trans. this passage runs: "He has also regard to the House of the Deceased De Lale.">[
1684.—"Five Delolls, or Brokers, of Decca, after they had been with me went to Mr. Beard's chamber...."—Hedges, Diary, July 25; [Hak. Soc. i. 152].
1754.—"Mr. Baillie at Jugdea, accused by these villains, our dulols, who carried on for a long time their most flagrant rascality. The Dulols at Jugdea found to charge the Company 15 per cent. beyond the price of the goods."—Fort Wm. Cons. In Long, p. 50.
1824.—"I was about to answer in great wrath, when a dalal, or broker, went by, loaded with all sorts of second-hand clothes, which he was hawking about for sale."—Hajji Baba, 2d ed. i. 183; [ed. 1851, p. 81].
1835.—"In many of the sooks in Cairo, auctions are held ... once or twice a week. They are conducted by 'delláls' (or brokers).... The 'delláls' carry the goods up and down, announcing the sums bidden by the cries of 'ḥarág.'"—Lane, Mod. Egyptians, ed. 1860, p. 317; [5th ed. ii. 13].
DEMIJOHN, s. A large glass bottle holding 20 or 30 quarts, or more. The word is not Anglo-Indian, but it is introduced here because it has been supposed to be the corruption of an Oriental word, and suggested to have been taken from the name of Damaghān in Persia. This looks plausible (compare the Persian origin of [carboy], which is another name for just the same thing), but no historical proof has yet been adduced, and it is doubted by Mr. Marsh in his Notes on Wedgwood's Dictionary, and by Dozy (Sup. aux Dict. Arabes). It may be noticed, as worthy of further enquiry, that Sir T. Herbert (192) speaks of the abundance and cheapness of wine at Damaghān. Niebuhr, however, in a passage quoted below, uses the word as an Oriental one, and in a note on the 5th ed. of Lane's Mod. Egyptians, 1860, p. 149, there is a remark quoted from Hammer-Purgstall as to the omission from the detail of domestic vessels of two whose names have been adopted in European languages, viz. the garra or jarra, a water 'jar,' and the demigān or demijān, 'la dame-jeanne.' The word is undoubtedly known in modern Arabic. The Moḥīt of B. Bistānī, the chief modern native lexicon, explains Dāmijāna as 'a great glass vessel, big-bellied and narrow-necked, and covered with wicker-work; a Persian word.'[[104]] The vulgar use the forms damajāna and damanjāna. Dame-jeanne appears in P. Richelet, Dict. de la Langue Franc. (1759), with this definition: "[Lagena amplior] Nom que les matelots donnent à une grande bouteille couverte de natte." It is not in the great Castilian Dict. of 1729, but it is in those of the last century, e.g. Dict. of the Span. Academy, ed. 1869. "Damajuana, f. Prov(incia de) And(alucia), CASTAÑA ..."—and castaña is explained as a "great vessel of glass or terra cotta, of the figure of a chestnut, and used to hold liquor." [See N.E.D. which believes the word adopted from dame-jeanne, on the analogy of 'Bellarmine' and 'Greybeard.']
1762.—"Notre vin étoit dans de grands flacons de verre (Damasjanes) dont chacun tenoit près de 20 bouteilles."—Niebuhr, Voyage, i. 171.
DENGUE, s. The name applied to a kind of fever. The term is of West Indian, not East Indian, origin, and has only become known and familiar in India within the last 30 years or more. The origin of the name which seems to be generally accepted is, that owing to the stiff unbending carriage which the fever induced in those who suffered from it, the negroes in the W. Indies gave it the name of 'dandy fever'; and this name, taken up by the Spaniards, was converted into dengy or dengue. [But according to the N.E.D. both 'dandy' and 'dengue' are corruptions of the Swahili term, ka dinga pepo, 'sudden cramp-like seizure by an evil spirit.'] Some of its usual characteristics are the great suddenness of attack; often a red eruption; pain amounting sometimes to anguish in head and back, and shifting pains in the joints; excessive and sudden prostration; afterpains of rheumatic character. Its epidemic occurrences are generally at long intervals.
Omitting such occurrences in America and in Egypt, symptoms attach to an epidemic on the Coromandel coast about 1780 which point to this disease; and in 1824 an epidemic of the kind caused much alarm and suffering in Calcutta, Berhampore, and other places in India. This had no repetition of equal severity in that quarter till 1871-72, though there had been a minor visitation in 1853, and a succession of cases in 1868-69. In 1872 it was so prevalent in Calcutta that among those in the service of the E. I. Railway Company, European and native, prior to August in that year, 70 per cent. had suffered from the disease; and whole households were sometimes attacked at once. It became endemic in Lower Bengal for several seasons. When the present writer (H. Y.) left India (in 1862) the name dengue may have been known to medical men, but it was quite unknown to the lay European public.
1885.—The Contagion of Dengue Fever. "In a recent issue (March 14th, p. 551) under the heading 'Dengue Fever in New Caledonia,' you remark that, although there had been upwards of nine hundred cases, yet, 'curiously enough,' there had not been one death. May I venture to say that the 'curiosity' would have been much greater had there been a death? For, although this disease is one of the most infectious, and as I can testify from unpleasant personal experience, one of the most painful that there is, yet death is a very rare occurrence. In an epidemic at Bermuda in 1882, in which about five hundred cases came under my observation, not one death was recorded. In that epidemic, which attacked both whites and blacks impartially, inflammation of the cellular tissue, affecting chiefly the face, neck, and scrotum, was especially prevalent as a sequela, none but the lightest cases escaping. I am not aware that this is noted in the text-books as a characteristic of the disease; in fact, the descriptions in the books then available to me, differed greatly from the disease as I then found it, and I believe that was the experience of other medical officers at the time.... During the epidemic of dengue above mentioned, an officer who was confined to his quarters, convalescing from the disease, wrote a letter home to his father in England. About three days after the receipt of the letter, that gentleman complained of being ill, and eventually, from his description, had a rather severe attack of what, had he been in Bermuda, would have been called dengue fever. As it was, his medical attendant was puzzled to give a name to it. The disease did not spread to the other members of the family, and the patient made a good recovery.—Henry J. Barnes, Surgeon, Medical Staff, Fort Pitt, Chatham." From British Medical Journal, April 25.