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0331 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 331 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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IRANIAN MINERALS-SAL AMMONIAC   505

reaching the size of a finger and being used for medical purposes."' It is accordingly the old experience that the Chinese, as soon as they became acquainted with a foreign product, searched for it on their own soil, and either discovered it there, or found a convenient substitute. In this case, Su Sun plainly indicates that'the domestic substitute was of inferior quality; and there can be no doubt that this was not sal ammoniac, which is in fact not found in China, but, as has been demonstrated by D. HANBURY,2 chloride of sodium. As early as the eighteenth century it was stated by M. COLLAS3 that no product labelled nao-.a in Peking had any resemblance to our sal ammoniac.

H. E. STAPLETON,4 author of a very interesting study on the employment of sal ammoniac in ancient chemistry, has hazarded an etymological speculation as to the term nao-.a. Persian nü. adur appears to him to be the Chinese word nau-. a, suffixed by the Persian word dâra ("medicine "),5 and the Sanskrit navasâra would also seem to be simply the Chinese name in a slightly altered form. H. E. Stapleton is a chemist, not a philologist; it therefore suffices to say that these speculations, as well as his opinion "that the syllables nau-. a appear to be capable of complete analysis into Chinese roots,"6 are impossible.

The Hindustani name can by no means come into question as the prototype of the Chinese term, as proposed by F. P. SMITH? and T. WATTERS;8 for the Chinese transcription was framed as early as the sixth century A.D., when Hindustani was not yet in existence. The Hindustani is simply a Persian loan-word of recent date, as is likewise Neo-Sanskrit naiçadala; while Sanskrit navasâra, navasâdara, or narasâra, the vacillating spelling of which betrays the character of a loan-word, is traceable to a more ancient Iranian form (see below) .

In the Sui §u9 we meet the term in the form r nao-spa, stated to

1 See also Pen ts`ao yen i, Ch. 6, p. 4 b (ed. of Lu Sin-yüan). a Science Papers, pp. 217, 276.

3 Mémoires concernant les Chinois, Vol. XI, 1786, p. 33o.

' Sal Ammoniac: a Study in Primitive Chemistry (Memoirs As. Soc. Bengal, Vol. I, 1905, pp. 4o-41).

5 He starts from the popular etymology nû. ddrû ("life-giving medicine"), which, of course, is not to be taken seriously.

s Even if this were the case, it would not tend to prove that the word is of Chinese origin. As is now known to every one, there is nothing easier to the Chinese than to transcribe a foreign word and to choose such characters as will convey a certain meaning.

Contributions toward the Materia Medica of China, p. 19o. 8 Essays on the Chinese Language, p. 35o. s Ch. 83, pp. 4 b and 5 b.