504 safford: lignum nephriticum 



it is now to be found in drug collections, and its very name has 

 disappeared from encyclopedias. 



Monardes (1565) was the first to call attention to the wood, 

 but he knew nothing of its origin except that it came from Mexico. 

 Hernandez, writing about the year 1576, described the plant 

 producing it under the name coatl, or coatli, as follows: A shrub 

 or tree with leaves like those of a chick-pea {Cicer arietinum) 

 but smaller, and with spikes of small longish flowers. The color 

 of the flowers he described as yellow and faded ; but he evidently 

 drew his description from dried material, as was the case with the 

 majority of plants described by him, which were gathered and 

 brought to him by Indian herb doctors. Hernandez Was a phy- 

 sician rather than a naturalist, and many of his descriptions and 

 illustrations of both plants and animals are so crude as to be un- 

 recognizable. Of lignum nephriticum he gave no illustration. 

 He was even uncertain regarding the plant producing it, stating 

 that they had described it to him as a shrub, but that he had seen 

 specimens of it exceeding very large trees in size. Hernandez's 

 work on the products of Mexico remained in manuscript for 

 almost two centuries and never appeared as a whole. The 

 portions of it relating to medicine were grouped together and 

 prepared for publication by Nardo Antonio Recchi; but owing 

 to lack of funds or for some other reason Recchi's compilation 

 did not appear until 1751, seventy-three years after Hernandez's 

 death, though a Spanish translation from Recchi's Latin manu- 

 script by Fray Francisco Ximenez appeared in 1615, in the city 

 of Mexico. 



In the meantime the plant itself remained unidentified botanic- 

 ally. Caesalpinius (1583) and Caspar Bauhin (1623) supposed 

 it to be a species of Fraxinus. Terrentius, in Recchi's epitome 

 of Hernandez (1651), referred it to the Leguminosae but did not 

 attempt to identify it. Johan Boeclerus (1745), believing it to 

 be a Laburnum, called it Cytissus mexicanus. Linnaeus, in his 

 Materia Medica (1749), added to the confusion by referring it to 

 Moringa pterygosperma, an East Indian tree, in spite of the fact 

 that it was originally declared to be of Mexican origin ; and Gui- 



