EVERYTHING HAS ITS USE. 441 



of their roots or the delicious substance of their fruits ; others again 

 supply him with textile fibres, dyeing or resinous materials, and 

 woods which the artist and the artisan convert to numerous uses. 

 This vegetable wealth has been widely distributed over South America. 

 It will suffice to indicate a few of its more notable sources. 



If we direct our attention to medicinal plants, we shall probably 

 find none more precious than the Quinquina, whose bark is the most 

 effective of all febrifuges, and which is endowed, moreover, with very 

 valuable tonic and depuratory properties. Sir Samuel Baker, in his 

 recent address to the British Association at Dundee, pronounced it 

 the traveller's best friend, the powerful weapon with which he could 

 securely enter the African wilderness, and successfully contend against 

 its demon-host of fevers and agues. The Quinquinas (genus, Cin- 

 chona ; family, Rubiacece) are trees or evergreen shrubs with large 

 and handsome leaves, and flowers whose form and fragrance remind 

 one of the lilac. They are diffused over the two slopes, but chiefly 

 along the eastern slope, of the Andean Cordilleras, in the republics of 

 Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The traveller 

 meets them occasionally in picturesque groups or thickets which the 

 Peruvians call Manchas (spots) ; but they are more frequently scat- 

 tered in immense forests. 



What of the lactiferous and resinous plants ? South America is 

 the native land of the trees whence we extract the resinous gums 

 called " Anime d'Amerique," " White Amber," and " Soft Brazilian 

 Copal," and the " Hevea Guyanensis," which furnishes the greater 

 portion of the caoutchouc imported into Europe. 



Caoutchouc was described for the first time in 1736, by the scien- 

 tific travellers Bouguer and La Condamine, members of a Commission 

 despatched to Peru by the Parisian " Academie des Sciences," to 

 measure an arc of the meridian. A few years later, the engineer 

 Fresneau, who resided for a long time in Guiana, collected, with the 

 assistance of a native, ample information in reference to caoutchouc 

 and the tree which produced it. Finally, in 1768, was found in a 

 work by the traveller Aublet on the Flora of Guiana, the description 



