THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 445 



for giving light and other purposes. Among these is the 

 wax-pahn {Ceroxylon andicola) found in the Andes, the 

 stipe of which is incrusted with this substance, which the 

 savages remove by rubbing it off as they climb the tree. 

 The candleberry-myrtle {Myrka cerifera) is another, but in 

 it the precious substance exudes from the fruit, and is ex- 

 tracted by simply boiling it, the wax quickly rising to the top. 

 Again, some vegetable secretions, formed in obscurity, 

 deep in the stems of certain trees, and gathered by the 

 intelligent hand of man, add to the wealth of nations. 

 Thus the French pine spreads its treasures over the once 

 sterile heaths of Bordeaux. From incisions made in it 

 flows a tiirpentine which the resin-gatherers, active as 

 monkeys, collect in numberless cups suspended to the 

 trunks of the trees.^ 



of strange hypotheses among the learned. For a long time it was thought that 

 these stalactites or tears of sugar, which appear so quickly, were only a deposit 

 from the atmosphere, and this error, so difficult to eradicate, was shared by all 

 antiquity. 



The manna used in medicine is principally procured from the flowering-ash 

 {Fraxinus ornus), which is cultivated for this purpose in Sicily and Calabria. 

 Other trees produce sugary substances quite analogous to this. The larch-tree 

 (Larix europcea, Linn.) furnishes the manna of Brianjon. In some countries 

 even herbs are covered with an abundant sugary exudation. Bruce observed 

 this in Abyssinia ; and Mathiola relates that in some parts of Italy the manna 

 glues the grass of the meadows together in such a manner as to impede the 

 mowers at their work. 



^The resin is extracted when the maritime pine has reached the age of twenty 

 to thirty years. In order to obtain it, workmen, called resin-gatherers, remove 

 with an axe the coarse bark from the lower part of the trunk, over a surface 

 about a foot wide and a foot and a half deep. On this surface they afterwards 

 excavate with a small hatchet, the head of which is shaped like a gouge, a still 

 deeper cutting, which lays bare the most superficial of the woody zones, for it is 

 between these and the bark that the resin flows ; this last incision is about six 

 inches high and four wide. After this operation the workmen scoop out a little 

 pit in the body of the tree in order to receive the resin as it flows. Each week 

 the resin-gatherer renews the surface by paring off' above a thin slip, so small 

 that the excavation in the course of a single season does not extend beyond 

 eighteen inches in length. These cuttings are prolonged through a series of 

 years till they reach a height of twelve or fourteen feet, when the workmen 



