114 Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society. 



mere side-issue in the criminal prosecution of a Kaffir or Hottentot. 

 The plant drugs and poisons of a country so richly endowed with 

 them are of quite sufficient importance per se to warrant their being 

 made the subject of special research under the auspices of the State. 

 As yet neither State nor University nor College has bestowed any 

 attention whatever on this branch of science, nor have we amongst 

 our local scientists men of pecuniary resource sufficient to enable 

 them unendowed to undertake so laborious and costly a study, for 

 hope of return there can be none. At the same time it must be 

 admitted that a few diligent investigators have, with the limited 

 means at their command, accumulated, as far as isolated individuals 

 can under the circumstances, a fair store of valuable information. 

 With special reference to the subject under consideration, these 

 investigators may be told off upon the fingers of one hand : in fact, 

 to take the matter of chemical research generally, although we 

 pride ourselves upon our advanced civilisation, if we consider what 

 has long been done, and is indeed at this very moment being accom- 

 plished in this direction in Japan — a country in the throes of a 

 terrible war — by the Japanese, whom we have been too apt to regard 

 as entirely beneath us in intellect and culture, we shall be bound to 

 admit — did we but realise the facts sufficiently — that as regards 

 chemical research South Africa occupies a very backward position 

 amongst the countries of the world. 



Dr. Pappe's " List of South African Indigenous Plants used as 

 Remedies by the Colonists of the Cape of Good Hope," published in 

 1847, was perhaps the first attempt to deal with the subject of 

 pharmacology in this connection ; and yet the pamphlet — for it 

 comprised only fourteen pages at its first appearance — dealt with the 

 matter almost wholly from the botanical standpoint, the medical 

 aspect being quite subsidiary, while the chemical nature of the drugs 

 enumerated is alluded to only in the most casual way, and even that 

 but occasionally and in the vaguest of terms. 



Some thirty years later Cape Aloes and Buchu were made the 

 subjects of special monographs, and about the same time an account 

 was published by Dr. Grey of a case of poisoning in the Middelburg 

 Division by the agency of certain bulbs. None of these, however, 

 do more than touch on the chemistry of the drugs they discuss, and, 

 where they do otherwise, as frequently as not the writers fall into 

 error. Thus Grey refers to the ornithogalum poison as if it were 

 strychnine, or, at all events, a close connection of that alkaloid ; 

 whereas the active principle is, in all probability, a glucoside, seeing 

 that it is destroyed by boiling. 



Smith, in his " South African Materia Medica," approaches nearer 



