A TREE OF LOST IDENTITY 



489 



the wood is of a white color. Of this water they drink 

 repeatedly and with it they dilute their wine, and it 

 causes very wonderful and manifest effects without any 

 alteration nor any other requisite than good order and 

 regimen. The water has no more taste than if nothing 

 had been put into it, for the wood does not change it at 

 all. Its complexion is hot and dry in the first degree." 



Francisco Hernandez, protomedico of Philip II, who 

 returned to Spain in 1577 after having spent seven years 

 in Mexico studying the resources and useful products 

 of that country, added nothing to Monardes' description 

 of the wood, but gave testimony as to its medicinal 

 . irtues, and for the first time described the plant pro- 

 ducing the Lignum nephritic um of Mexico. 



Interest in the question of the botanical source of 

 this wood was revived by W. E. Safford, economic 

 botanist, U. S. Department of Agriculture, and an arti- 

 cle appeared in the Smithsonian Report for 1915 imder 

 the title "Lignum Nephriticutn Its History and an Ac- 

 count of the Remarkable Fluorescence of Its Infusion." 

 Mr. SafTord traced the printed records of the wood 

 through many years and various languages, the whole 

 constituting a remarkable piece of botanical detective 

 work. Here are some of his conclusions : 



"In 1646 Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit living 

 in Rome, celebrated for his great learning and his con- 

 tributions to science, published an account of Lignum 

 nephriticum in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, under 

 the heading 'On a certain wonderful wood, coloring 

 water all kinds of colors.' (C)p. cit., p. 77.) He calls 

 attention to the fact that other writers before him had 

 described the wood as coloring water only a blue color ; 

 yet in his experiments he had found that it transformed 

 water into all kinds of colors. His description of the 

 plant yielding the wood was not made from observation, 

 but was undoubtedly taken froni Ximenez's translation 

 of Hernandez's work, published 31 years jireviously. 

 He then goes on to say : 



" 'The wood of the tree thus described, when made 

 into a cup, tinges water when poured into it at first a 

 deep blue, the color of a Bugloss flower ; and the longer 

 the water stands in it the deeper the color it assumes. 

 If then the water is poured into a glass globe and held 

 against the light, no vestige of the blue color will be 

 seen, but it will appear to observers like ])ure clean 

 spring water, lim])id and clear. Rut if you move this 

 glass phial toward a more shady place the lic|uid will 

 assume a most delightful greenness, and if to a still more 

 shady place, a reddish color ; and thus it will change 

 color in a marvelous way according to the nature of its 

 background. In the dark, however, or in an oi)ac|ue 

 vase, it will once more assume its blue color.' 



"Kircher announces that he was the first to observe 

 this chameleon-like color, as far as he knew, in a cu|) 

 given to him as a present by the procurator of the So- 

 ciety of Jesus in Mexico. This cup he afterwards sent 

 as a gift to his Sacred Majesty the Emperor, as some- 

 thing rare and little known. 'But,' he adds, 'as to the 

 cause of the strange phenomenon which I observed, I 



failed at first to understand it; for I saw that the color 

 could be counted neither among the apparent nor the 

 true colors; not among the former, because the true or 

 real color comes from the nature of the wood and not 

 from the light variously modified, as is usual with ap- 

 parent colors ; nor can it be considered a real color, since 

 no color is seen in it when it is held up against the light ; 

 and it assumes different kinds of colors only when held 

 against different objects.' The learned philosopher, true 

 to his boast that there was no problem in nature that 

 he could not solve, concludes with the statement : 'Taught, 

 however, by various experiments, I have at last found 

 the cause, which I shall publish hereafter.' This, how- 

 ever, he never did. 



"Four years after the publication of Kircher's work 

 Johan Bauhin, in his Historia Plantarum -(1650), de- 

 scribes a second cup made of Lignum nephriticum, which 

 he had received under the name of Palum indianum from 

 a colleague. Dr. Schopffius, physician to the Duke of 



CUP MADE FROM THE WOOD OF LOST IDENTITY 



Tliis cup is of Lignum nephriticum and with it is a flask containing water 

 ill which chips of the wood have been soaked. The water is thereby colored 

 and the wood gives it a property which was supposed long years ago to 

 maite it medicinally valuable. 



