FEBRUARy I, 1884,] THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST, 



585 



You, sir, will know whether the charge brought by 

 Mr. Uurti's against the old sugar failures is cor- 

 rect or not. Bat at any rate the rotation of s-agar- 

 cans and citronella at Baddegama is a matter of 



public interest, and— it pays.— Yoars faithfully, 



H. W. GBEEN, 

 Director of Public Instruction. 



CINCHONA BABK AND QUININE. 

 From the Annus Pharmaceuticus iu 1883 of the Pharmaceut- 

 ical JouriMl and Transactions, the editor, Dr. Paul, send.s 

 us tlie following interesting extracts :— '• The article which 

 has probably occupied the pen most has once more been cin- 

 chona bark, one fact becoming more and more apparent that 

 although cinchona cultivation is still mcreasiug in different 

 parts of the world, especially in Ceylon and Jamaica, 

 considerable uncertainty exists as to the exact species that 

 are being grown. It is evident that until this confusion 

 is cleared up the commercial cultivation of the plants 

 can only be carried ou by rule of thumb, and the assist- I 

 ance the chemist would be capable of rendering to the 

 cultivator will be minimised through the shortcomings of 

 the botanist. Nevertheless some interesting facts have been 

 placed on record, and one or two of these point to the 

 probability that when the botanist has done his work, 

 be will only have made it still more evident that the 

 cultivator must always look to the chemist to help him , 

 to decide under what conditions of growth any species 

 or variety of " Cinchona " may be made to produce the 

 most favourable yield of alkaloid. In the first place Dr. 

 Trimenhas reported some experience with what were believed 

 to be succirubra plants all raised from one kind of seed, which 

 seems to show that elevation has a great influenoe on the de- 

 velopment of alkaloids, nearly twice as much alkaloid being 

 found in the bark grown at a" height of 5,500 feet as in the 

 bark grown at 1,50(1 feet, whilst the alkaloid iu the former 

 case was mainly lavorotatory (quinine and cinchonidiue) 

 and in the latter ease principally dextrorotatory (cincho- 

 nine and quinidiuel. Analyses made by the late Sir. J. 

 E. Howard of barks from different elevations in Jamaica 

 and in Ceylon appeared to confirm this inference, and it 

 is worth mentioning that in all the cases the bark grown 

 at the lower elevation, though considered to have the 

 best appearance, was poorest in alkaloid. Mr. D. Howard 

 has recorded the observation that whilst iu renewed bark 

 produced on trees after stripping according to llr. Jlclvor's 

 plan in which alternate slrips are removed down to the 

 cambium, the proportion of quinine is higher than in the 

 original bark, the reverse is the case in renewed bark 

 produced after the " shaving " process, in which the bark 

 is usually removed uniformly and superficially, the tend- 

 ency being then to develop cinchonidiue at the expense 

 of <iuinine. * He also states, as evidence of the field there 

 is for skill in the selection of cinchonas for cultivation, 

 that he has met with original "red bark" yitding -1 or 5 

 per cent of quinine, whilst calisaya bark from individual 

 trees, grown in Ceylon under apparently similar conditions, 

 varied from 3 to 9 per cent in the yield of quinine. Such 

 a result is perplexing ; nevertheless, the general results 

 seem to show that, other things being equal, the plants 

 yielding the most valuable barks grow in the richest soil. 

 which is quite in accord with what might be expected 

 and also with the experience of Mr. Broughton, published 

 a dozen years ago. A similar lesson hS to the relative 

 ctfect of the depth to which the bark is rnuovcd appears 

 to be taught by some analy.ses, made by Mr. J. Hodgkiu, 

 of different pieces of Ceylon succirubra quill bark taken 

 from the same consignment, some being natural, some 

 renewed, and some partially natural and partially renewed 

 on the same piece. In the renewed portion of the natural- 

 renewed (luill, where the shaving removed w'ould necess- 

 arily be <lecreasingly thin, the quantity of quinine was 

 less than in the entirely natural quills, while the cinchoni- 

 diue was more than double. The entirely renewed bark 

 showed an increase of quinine equal to 75 per cent, which 

 more than outstripped the increase in ciiichonidine. The 

 cinchonine did not show much variation, but there ap- 

 peared a considerable diminution of alkaloid in the natura 

 * We cannot accept this question as at all settled. 

 —Ed. 



bark in juxtaposition to the renewed bark. Similar re- 

 sults have been obtained before, though Jlr. Hodgkin has 

 been the first to make them known. Of course the value 

 of any inferences drawn from these results would be de- 

 pendent upon the extent to which the different pieces 

 analysed were comparable one with another. Dr. Hesse has 

 added two more to the already long list of cinchona alkal- 

 oi,3s. — coucusconine and coucusconidine, — and he has en- 

 dorsed the claim of the substance isolated from cuprea bark 

 almost simultaneously by three sets of observers to be con- 

 sidered a new alkaloid. He, as well as others, has failed to 

 obtain the crystalline compound of quinine and quinidme 

 which was rather too hastily assumed to have been mistaken 

 for a new alkaloid, but fitessrs. Wood and Barrett have 

 now published definite instructions for the preparation of 

 this compound, as well as compounds of quinine and quini- 

 dine and quinine and cinchonidiue with benzene, the dif- 

 ference in form of crystallization of which they state may 

 be used as a delicate test for an admixture of cinchonidiue 

 with quinine sulphate. 



"Whilst on the subject of cinchona bark, it may be men- 

 tioned that Dr. Paul, having been struck by the fact that a 

 sample of professedly B. P. liquid extract of cinchona con- 

 tained only a very small amount of quinine, was induced to 

 examine several other samples collected from different sources 

 and found that they all agreed in containing but a very 

 small proportion of quinine, varying from mere traces up to 

 2 grains per fluid ounce. As the hquid extract, if it fully 

 represented the alkaloidal contents of an official bark, would 

 contain about 35 grains to the fluid ounce, Dr. Pan] made 

 further experiments to ascertain whether an explanation 

 was to be found in the official process being insufficient for 

 the complete exhaustion, in which he used a sample of 

 ordinary " flat calisaya," as now met with, and a sample of 

 Indian bark, both of known composition. Upon analysing 

 the liquid extracts made according to the B. P. process 

 and the residual marks, it was found that only about one- 

 seventh part of the alkaloids in the original barks had 

 passed iuto the preparations. These results were commu- 

 nicated to the Pharmaceutical Society at an Evening Meet- 

 ing and gave rise to an animated discussion. Professor Red- 

 wood maintaining that the official conditions as to the 

 choice of a bark had not been complied with, and that, 

 therefore, the experiments could not be used as criteria 

 in estimating the value of the official process. A remark 

 made by Dr. Paul to the effect that he could not confirm 

 a stitement by Mr. Ekin as to the tincture being a good 

 preparation led that gentleman to request Alessrs. Hogg 

 and Broithwaite to make some independent experiments, 

 the result of which went to demonstrate the correctness 

 of Dr. Paul's statement, that after the preparation of a 

 tincture of cinchona by the oflScial process as much alkal- 

 oid remains in the bark as the spirit has taken out. Con- 

 nected with this discussion a bye-controversy was started 

 in respect to the well-known preparation of the late Mr. 

 Battley, which, however, revealed little beyond the fact 

 that that gentleman knew better how to keep a secret than 

 was commonly supposed. 



Considerable progress was made during the year in 

 working out the chemical and pharmaceutical history of 

 nux-vomica and its preparations, in a series of invest- 

 igations conducted by Messrs. Dunstan and Short. The 

 first step was to contrive a process for the ana- 

 lysis of the drug, which consisted iu exhausting the pow- 

 dered seeds in an ingeniously contrived apparatus with 

 a mixtnre of chloroform and alcohol, removing the al- 

 kaloids from this mixtnre as acid sulphates by shaking with 

 dilute sulphuric acid, and then after decomposing with 

 ammonia taking up the liberated alkaloids again with 

 chloroform. When this process was applied to specimens of 

 seeds authenticated as from Bombay, Cochin and Madras, it 

 was found that their richness iu alkaloid corresponded with 

 the order in which they are named, ranging in one series 

 from 3--)6 per cent, in Bombay to 274 in Madras seeds. 

 This variation, which had jjreviously been suspected, hav- 

 ing been (established, it followed naturally as a corollary that 

 it should be reproduced in the preparations, as indeeil ap- 

 peared in a paper sent by the same authors to the Confer- 

 ence meeting, giving the results of analyses of a dozen com- 

 mercial specimens of tincture of nux-vomica. In this paper, 

 the authors, avaiUug themselves of the insolubility of strych. 

 nine ferrocyauide in dilute sulphuric acid as a means of 



