426 MILK-SAP. PAET ii. 



This order furnishes the Ethiope and the native Brazi- 

 lian with poison for their arrows. It contains the Man- 

 chineel, and Excoecaria Agallocha, the most poisonous 

 of plants ; even the smoke from the burning branches of 

 the Exccecaria affects the eyes with insufferable pain. 

 The white juice of the Fig, one of the Morad order, is 

 violently poisonous ; in many, as in the common fig, it 

 is acrid and irritating. The Antiaris toxicaria, the 

 celebrated Upas-tree of Java, which is of the Arto- 

 carpeee or Bread-fruit order, owes its virulence to its 

 milky juice, which contains strychnia, the most fatal 

 of drugs. Dangerous and acrid as these orders are, 

 the Bread-fruit, abounding in starch, supplies the in- 

 habitants of the East Indian islands with excellent 

 food ; the milky juice of the Cow-trees, chiefly of the 

 Bread-fruit and Fig orders, furnishes a wholesome 

 beverage to the South Americans ; and the Manihot or 

 Cassava, a poisonous spurgewort when raw, yields 

 when roasted nutritious food to whole nations, the heat 

 driving off the dangerous principle. Caoutchouc, a 

 most harmless substance, is the solid produce of many 

 of the most acrid and virulent juices of plants belonging 

 to the preceding orders ; the poison is probably left in 

 the liquid. The chemico-vital power is strikingly illus- 

 trated by the number of safe and excellent fruits pro- 

 duced by trees full of the most deleterious juices, 

 whether milky or not. Some of the finest fruits in the 

 Indian Archipelago are products of eminently danger- 

 ous species of the Sapindacese or Soapworts. The acrid 

 juices of the leaves and branches, are so much diluted 

 with water in the fruits, that they become innocuous, or 

 they may be changed into sugar, as in the common fig. 

 Nothing can surpass the virulence of the juice of the 

 Upas-tree, yet its nuts are eaten with impunity, and the 

 pulpy contents of the fruit of the Strychnos nux vomica 

 is food for birds. The leaves and berries of the potato 

 are so strongly narcotic, that an extract from them is 



