THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 451 



Nature offers vis in profusion the greatest contrasts. 

 On one side, with generous and beneficent liand she lavislies 

 food and sakitary remedies ; on the other, slie only distils 

 poisons, as though in the laboratory of Medea. 



Here we see opium perspiring like a milky dew from 

 the heads of our poppies, and becoming so indispensable 

 to the art of medicine, that Sydenham, the Hij)pocrates of 

 modern times, said he would renounce his profession were 

 he deprived of this powerful anodyne. There we behold 

 the poisons of belladonna, datura, and henbane, by turns 

 useful and deadl}^ 



But no tree prepares in its invisible laboratories such 

 precious crystals as the cinchona; nature offers us no 

 other medicine which is so potent. The cinchona alone 

 arrests the ravages of deadly fevers in their fatal progress ; 

 without it many countries would be uninhabitable, many 

 journeys impossible. Hence, in their enthusiasm about its 

 marvellous power, many physicians, in imitation of Torti, 

 have given it the name of "herculean remedy."^ 



they require, the factors on the coast begin to be uneasy as to what will happen 

 should this butter become an article of commerce ; and in order that nothing 

 may divert the inhabitants from slave-hunting, they have induced the King of 

 Dahomey to order the destruction of all the butter-trees in his kingdom. War 

 is really declared against the tree ; it is burned so soon as ever it springs up again, 

 and yet it re-appears each year, as if constantly and energetically remonstrating 

 with man for deliberately destroying a gift of nature. — Karl Miiller, Merveilles 

 du Monde Vegetal. Paris, t. ii. p. 196. 



As respects the milk or cow tree, paolo de vaca, as it is called in the country, 

 M. Boussingault, who at Humboldt's request analyzed its products, states that 

 its physical properties are exactly similar to those of cow's milk, except that it 

 is a little more viscous. It is remarkable for containing an enormous quantity 

 of wax. This substance constitutes the lialf of its weight, and hence the learned 

 chemist proposed to cultivate the tree in order to extract the wax. — Humboldt, 

 Voyage aux Regions Equinoxiales du Nouvean Continent. Paris, 1814, t. i. 



^ The following passages will show how M. Georges Pouchet, following the 

 account of La Condamine, inserted in the Memoires de V Academie des Sciences, 

 has traced the history of the discovery of the most powerful medicine we possess: — 



" 111 1638, Count Chinchon being vice-regent of Peru for the crown of Spain, 



