(JO INSECT-WHITE-WAX OF CHINA. 



i85i. As the Calumba wood recently imported did not meet with a 

 ready sale, a quantity of it -was sawed into discs of about a 

 sixth of an inch in thickness, and in this state offered as 

 Calumba root! The appearance of these discs is so entirely 

 different from that of genuine Calumba root, that there seems 

 but little danger of their being purchased in mistake, at least 

 in this country. The smoothness of the sawed surfaces, hard- 

 ness, and peculiar ligneous structure, together with the absence 

 of starch, are quite sufficient to distinguish this drug from the 

 true Calumba root. 



less. ON THE INSECT-WHITE-WAX OF CHINA. 



( Weisses chinesisches Insectenwachs?) 



SYNONYMS. &^ ) )^ Chung-pih-la, i.e. insect white- 

 wax ; Pih-la, Pe-la or Pe"-la, i.e. white-wax. In English, the names 

 White wax of insects, Chinese wax, Chinese insect-wax, Japanese 

 wax, 1 Tree wax, Chinese vegetable wax, Vegetable spermaceti, have 

 all been used to designate this substance. 



The crude wax is called L&-tcha i.e. wax-sediment ; the so- 

 called cocoons of the insect La-chung wax-seed, or La-tsze wax- 

 son ; the insects also are called La-chung (Julien), 



HISTORY. According to Siu-kouang-ki, the author of a well- 

 known Chinese treatise on agriculture called Nong-tching- 



1 This name has been applied to a kind of wax supposed to be extracted 

 from the seeds of lihus succedanea, Linn., as related by Ksempfer (Amcen. 

 p. 794) and Thunberg (Flor. Jap. p. 122). See Martiny's Encyklopddie der 

 Medicinisch-pharmaceutischen Naturalien und Rohwaarenkunde, Band i., 

 p. 172. A sample has been kindly presented to me by Dr. Theodor Martius, 

 and I have likewise met with it in the London market, eighty cases having 

 been offered for sale as Japan Beeswax, by Messrs. T. Merry and Son, May 

 20, 1852. My specimens consist of a white wax, of somewhat rancid odour, 

 in circular cakes of from 4 to 4 inches in diameter, nearly one inch thick, 

 flat on one side and rounded off on the other as if cast in a small saucer. 

 They are sparingly covered with a white powder, and, in Mr. Merry's wax, 

 present here and there traces of a sparkling crystalline efflorescence. The 

 fusing points of the samples I find to be respectively 125'6 and 131 Fahr. 

 Dr. Martiny gives it as + 45 C.= 113 Fahr. 



