PHARMACOPGIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS. 
qualities naturally became a favorite in Europe in the days of heroic 
medication. The early Spanish voyagers learned of its qualities from 
the natives, and in the sixteenth century carried large quantities to 
Europe. Monardes (447), in 1565, mentions a cathartic under the name 
Mechoacan rhubarb, or root, which some believe to have been jalap, 
but this Fliickiger (239) discredits, because Colon, an apothecary of 
Lyons, in 1619, states that jalap was then newly brought to France. 
Fliickiger also accepts that both drugs were well known in 1610, al- 
though often confused. Owing to this confusion between the two 
bulbs, one was called black mechoacan, while the other was known as 
white jalap. Strangely enough, the exact botanical source of jalap 
remained a question until 1829, when Dr. Coxe, of Philadelphia, 
author of Coxe’s American Dispensatory, identified the drug from liv- 
ing plants sent to him from Mexico, and published descriptions, with 
colored plates, in the American Journal of Medical Sciences, 1829. 
This celebrated cathartic, so much used by licensed physicians and in 
domestic medication, is to be credited to the natives of Central America, 
whose employment of the drug introduced it to European commercial 
adventurers who, as a matter of business, made it known to the profes- 
sions of medicine and pharmacy. 
KINO 
Kino is the dried juice of a handsome timber tree, Pterocarpus 
marsupium, a native of the southern parts of the Indian Peninsula 
and Ceylon. It is also obtained from several other trees which par- 
take of the qualities of an astringent drug. One of these, Pterocarpus 
indicus, is a tree of Southern India, the Malay Peninsula, and the Phil- 
ippine Islands. The drug, used by natives from time immemorial, was 
introduced into commerce by Fothergill (244), 1757. It came from 
the River Gambia, in Western Africa, where it had been previously 
noticed by Moore (449), who in his “Travels Into the Inland Parts of 
Africa,” 1737, mentioned the product under the name kano. Mungo 
Park, 1805, sent specimens of the tree to England, and from that date 
African kino has been a regular product of the English drug market. 
According to Duncan (202) in the Edinburgh Dispensatory, 1803, 
kino as found in England was an African product, but he recognizes 
a variety, indistinguishable from this, coming from Jamaica. In the 
1811 edition of the same work he asserts that the African drug is 
out of market, and that the East India Company now supply the mar- 
ket from Jamaica and New South Wales. It is evident that, as with 
Krameria, many species and varieties of the tree, native to widely 
different sections of the world, produce the substance known as kino, 
which, aside from the East India tree, Pterocarpus marsupium, are 
accepted as being very nearly identical with the material yielded by 
the kino tree of tropical Africa. Kino is obtained by incising the 
tree and removing the red jelly as it exudes, then drying it by exposure 
to the air. It is mildly astringent, and has been used in the manu- 
facture of wine. 
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