7/v JAVA. 109 



with him a collection of what seeds he could find. He was 

 unfortunately very unsuccessful, and obtained seeds of only 

 very inferior sorts. Jn 1866 the Government purchased, for 

 less than £50, a small quantity of seed of a supposed variety 

 of C. calisaya sent from America by Mr. Charles Ledger. So 

 well had this species been propagated that there were nearly 

 one million trees, worth more than a million and a half of 

 money, in the gardens, raised from the seed then purchased. 



It is Avell known that cinchona is so liable to hybridisation 

 that it is very difficult to obtain pure seedlings from the seed 

 even of pure trees, the offspring containing very often less 

 alkaloids than their parents. An experiment, which has proved 

 a great success, was made by Dr. Moens of grafting on the easily 

 reared and quickjy growing C. succiruhra stems, shoots from 

 the highest alkaloid-yielding trees. They have been found to 

 grow very rapidly and to reproduce pretty regularly the same 

 proportion of alkaloids as the trees from which the grafts were 

 cut. Of Mr. Ledger's variety, now raised to the rank of a new 

 species by Dr. Moens, the seed-raised trees may be of many 

 degrees of value, but all contain a far higher percentage of 

 quinine than any other species. I gathered as a memento of 

 my visit some flowers from trees whose bark yielded, with a 

 trace only of any other alkaloid, the extraordinary amount of 

 ten and even thirteen per cent, of pure quinine. Continued 

 cultivation has therefore, it would seem, vastly developed 

 the amount of quinine that these Ledgerianas contain, 

 compared with what they yield in their native forests of 

 Bolivia. 



The story of how the seed of this priceless tree (which can 

 now be propagated ad libitum) reached the Old World is so in- 

 teresting that I have extracted a few paragraphs from a letter of 

 its introducer, Mr. Charles Ledger, in the Field oi Feb. 5, 1881, 

 addressed to his brother, evoked by an account of the Dutch 

 Gardens I had contributed to the same journal in 1880 : 



" While engaged in my alpaca enterprise in 1856, a Bolivian 

 Indian, Manuel Tucra Mamani, formerly and afterwards a 

 cinchona bark-cutter, was accompanying me with two of his 

 sons. He accompanied me in almost all my frequent journeys 

 into the interior, and was very useful in examining the large 

 quantities of cinchona bark and alpaca wool I was constantly 

 9 



