BANCROFT ON THE HOG-GUM TREE OF JAMAICA, 139 



to clear up the obscurity which has long prevailed in regard 

 to the tree called Bois a Cochon by the French in St Do- 

 mingo. Two former medical practitioners of that island, 

 Mons. Corberand and Mons. Daron, and some others of 

 its ancient inhabitants, since settled in Jamaica, having pro- 

 cured me specimens of the tree long known there to them- 

 selves under the above name, and of its gum, I compared 

 these with specimens from our Hog-Gum tree, and have as- 

 certained their identity with each other. It is, nevertheless, 

 somewhat singular, that, although the gum in question was 

 not less prized in that colony than in this, as a remedy, equal 

 uncertainty and confusion should liave existed there, as iiere, 

 concerning the plant from which it was obtained. 



The first author of that island by whom 1 find it noticed, 

 is M. Pouppe-Desportes. He mentions it at pages 32 and 

 285, of his Traite des plantes usuelles de St Domingue, pub- 

 lished at Paris in 1770, under the names of Sucrier de Mon- 

 tague, ou Bois a Cochon, not suspecting that the latter name 

 properly belonged to a plant of a very different family and 

 natural order from the former, while the description he has 

 there given is applicable solely to the Siicrier de Montagne, 

 which was so called, because its wood was preferred to all 

 others for making staves for sugar hogsheads. Six years af- 

 terward* Pere Nicolson, of the order of Dominicans, who 

 had resided four years in St Domingo, published at Paris an 

 Essai sur P Histoire Naturelle de St Domingue; at page 169 

 of which he repeats the error of the prece<ling writer, in 

 mentioning Bois a Cochon as synonymous with Sucrier de 

 Montague, and gives a brief account of the tree, which coin- 

 cides entirely with that of M. Desportes, and seems indeed 

 to have been partly taken from it, although without any 

 acknowledgment. A few years after this, an eminent botanist, 

 Mr Olof Swartz, visited St Domingo, who, giving entire 

 credit, as it appears, to the account of Pere Nicolson, to 

 which alone he has referred, restricted his inquiries to the 

 simple determination of the botanical characters of the tree 

 properly called Sucrier de Montague, and upon finding them 



