28 



NAT. ORDER. CINCHONACEiE. 



South America; growing for the most part among mountainous re- 

 gions, diflicult of access, and in other i-espects affording but httle en- 

 couragement to the scientific traveller. To this cause we may ascribe 

 our comparative want of information respecting one of the most 

 valuable remedies which the vegetable world lias yet offered to 

 mankind. Recent events added to the valuable labors of pharma- 

 ceutical chemistry, and the present enterprise and improvement in 

 that science, will, it is hoped, soon bring us better acquainted with 

 the botanical characters of those of cinchona, to which medicine is 

 so much indebted. We believe the fact to be well established, that 

 there are many species of this tree, which yield a bark partaking 

 more or less of the properties that distinguish the imruvian bark 

 of commerce, although the destinctive characters of these species 

 are still a desideratum in our botanical works. Riz and Pavon have 

 described fifteen species native of Peru and Chili, and seven have 

 been found by Mutis, a very celebrated botanist of Cadiz, who went 

 to Santa Fe in 1760, as physician to the Viceroy, Don Pedro Misa 

 de la Cerda, which he found in the forest near Gruduas. It is now 

 known that very many more remain undescribed. The Edinburgh 

 College formerly enumerated three varieties of the Peruvian, viz.: 

 the common or pale bark, the red and the yellow ; but it has long 

 since been ascertained by both Spanish and Amei-ican botanists, 

 that these barks not only belong to distinct species, but that, prob- 

 ably, each of them is taken indiscriminately from several distinct 

 species. In the history of sciences, it often happens that the per- 

 son who knows how to diffuse, with a certain degree of boldness, 

 the discovery of another, passes for the discoverer himself, instead 

 of him who made the discovery. 



Sensible Properties. The recent discoveries of the French 

 chemists, M. M. Caventou and PoUetrcr supersede all the previous 

 researches, so far as medicine is concerned, into the nature of cin- 

 chonas. Vanquelin ascertained that there were three, if not four, 

 classes of cinchona-bark, differing essentially in their chemical con- 



