ANACAHUITE WOOD. 279 



some papilionaceous tree, although there are only general ap- isei. 

 pearanoes that guide him to such an opinion. It is to be hoped, 

 however, that this question may be soon set at rest by good, 

 dried specimens of the flower, fruit, and leaf of the tree being 

 obtained from Tampico, and submitted to some competent 

 botanical authority in Europe. 1 



Anacahuite wood, as I have seen it, consists of truncheons of Description of 

 about two feet long, varying from the thickness of a finger to An ^^ uite 

 that of a man's arm. The wood is covered with a thick, fibrous, 

 greyish-brown bark, coarsely furrowed longitudinally with deep 

 cracks, and so tough that it may be stripped off in pieces of 

 considerable length. A white pulverulent matter, resembling 

 an efflorescence, occurs between the layers of liber from which 

 it escapes as dust when the bark is torn. When one examines 

 a transverse section of a truncheon, one perceives the bark to 

 be of considerable thickness and to consist of two more or less 

 defined zones the inner more compact. The wood is of a 

 pale brown, marked with concentric zones, which, however, are 

 too little distinguished from one another to be counted with any 

 certainty. The pith is frequently eccentric ; its transverse sec- 

 tion sometimes shows a stellate form. 



Anacahuite wood is inodorous and insipid. A strong de- Decoction of 

 coction is transparent and of a sherry-brown colour ; it is wood, 

 blackened by a persalt of iron, but neither a solution of gelatine 

 nor of iodine affects it. The taste of the decoction is extremely 

 slight and unremarkable, so that one may reasonably be per- 

 mitted to doubt the extravagant, though, if true, very gratifying 

 assertions regarding the virtues of the drug. The experiments, 

 indeed, that have been instituted in the Great Hospital at 



1 I have not been able to find any notice of Anacahuite wood in any 

 author treating on Mexican Materia Medica whose works I possess. Her- 

 nandez (Rerum Medicarum Novce Hispanice Thesaurus, Romse, 1651, p. 67) 

 mentions a tree called Morbi Gallici arbor, whose Mexican name, Nana- 

 huaquahuitl, is, perhaps, not an impossible version of our Anacahuite. 

 Heller (Reisen in Mexiko, Leipzig, 1853, Anhang. sect. 3) does not enumerate 

 Anacahuite among the useful plants of Mexico ; nor do I find it in the 

 catalogue of Mexican products (including a long list of woods) sent to the 

 Paris Exhibition of 1855 ; or in the papers of Schlechtendal on Mexican 

 wood contributed to the pages of the Botanische Zeitung. 



