58 Professor Burnett’s 
of bark; salicine from willows; veratria from colchicum and 
white hellebore; morphia, narcotine, and meconic acid from 
opium; and so forth. Great caution, almost a jealous caution, 
is, nevertheless, required in watching both the extraction of 
these principles and the records of their effects: for it is not 
impossible, nay, it is far from being improbable, that some of 
these substances are products rather than educts of the che- 
mist’s operations; just as sugar may be produced from rags, 
tan from saw-dust, vinegar from wood, oxalic acid from offal, 
and so on. Not that the mere fact of such transmutations 
would render the substances produced a whit less valuable than 
if they were educed; their value must depend upon their in- 
trinsic worth; and it may be far more advantageous, under cer- 
tain circumstances, to resort to the crucible of the chemist, 
than to the laboratory of nature, for many of them. We know 
that wood consists elementarily of charcoal and water; that 
starch, and gum, and sugar, are similar in their elements 
likewise: and that they only differ from each other in their 
relative definite proportions: we know that nature, by vary- 
ing the atomic ratios of these few simple elements, changes, 
as in the ripening of fruit, tasteless lignin into powerful 
acids, which in their turn become converted into sugar, 
often impregnated with peculiar essential aromatic oils; and 
thus, in plants, her living retorts, Nature, from watery 
sap and atmospheric air, so modifies the union of three 
simple bodies, as to form gum, sugar, starch, lignin, resins, 
oils, acids, alkalies, and alkaloids, with numerous other 
proximate principles in abundance, of every kind and in 
every variety; and this by merely varying the relative pro- 
perties of the same simple constituents, oxygen, hydrogen, 
and carbon,—these three, for others are seldom and sparingly 
employed. Wealso know that in some instances our labora- 
tories can imitate the vegetable alembics, or render their pro- 
cesses subservient to our designs. ‘Thus, in malting barley, 
germination is suddenly checked when the starch of the grain 
has become converted into sugar; and by heat the same starch 
can be transmuted into gum. It is, therefore, not impossible 
that many of the more active vegetable principles may be in 
like manner formed, the more scarce from the more abundant. 
That some of the newly discovered bodies, at present, for con- 
venience, called proximate vegetable principles, such as caffein, 
asparagine, piperine, and so on, are not educts, but products, 
is more than probable, when we find that they do not exhibit 
the specific effects peculiar to the substances from which they 
are obtained. Thus we learn from Mr. Branps, that coffee 
is narcotic, but caflein, as that celebrated chemist proved by 
