50 ALIMENTARY PROPERTIES OF TREES- 



ID examining the physical properties of animal and vege- 

 table products, science displays them as closely linked 

 together ; but it strips them of what is marvellous, and 

 perhaps, therefore, of a part of their charms. Nothing 

 appears isolated ; the chemical principles that were believed 

 to be peculiar to animals are found in plants ; a common 

 chain links together all organic nature. 



Long before chemists had recognized small portions of 

 wax in the pollen of flowers, the varnish of leaves, and the 

 whitish dust of our plums and grapes, the inhabitants of the 

 Anctes of Quindiu made tapers with the thick layer of wax 

 that covers the trunk of a palm-tree.* It is but a few 

 year? since we discovered, in Europe, caseum, the basis of 

 cheese, in the emulsion of almonds ; yet for ages past, in 

 the mountains of the coast of Venezuela, the milk of a tree, 

 and Vhe cheese separated from that vegetable milk, have 

 beeii considered as a salutary aliment. How are we to 

 account for this singular course in the development of 

 knowledge? How have the unlearned inhabitants of one 

 hendsphere become cognizant of a fact which, in the other, 

 so long escaped the sagacity of the scientific ? It is because 

 a small number of elements and principles differently com- 

 bined are spread through several families of plants ; it is 

 because the genera and species of these natural families are 

 not equally distributed in the torrid, the frigid, and the 

 temperate zones; it is that tribes, excited by want, and 

 deriving almost all their subsistence from the vegetable 

 kingdom, discover nutritive principles, farinaceous and ali- 

 mentary substances, wherever nature has deposited them 

 in the sap, the bark, the roots, or the fruits of vegetables. 

 That amylaceous fecula which the seeds of the cereal plants 

 furnish in all its purity, is found united with an acrid and 

 sometimes even poisonous juice, in the roots of the arums, 

 the Tacca pinnatifida, and the Jatropha manihot. The 

 savage of America, like the savage of the South Sea 

 islands, has learned to dulcify the fecula, by pressing and 

 separating it from its juice. In the milk of plants, and in 

 the milky emulsions, matter extremely nourishing, albumen, 

 caseum, and sugar, are found mixed with caoutchouc and 

 with deleterious and caustic principles, such as nurphine 

 * Coroxylon andicola. 



