THE TECHNOLOGIST. [J use 1, 1S65. 



520 THE KOLA-NUT. 



considered of such inestimable value that ten were thought to be a gift 

 worthy of a king, and that for the moderate number of fifty a man might 

 purchase a wife out of the best families of the kingdom. Nay, the elder 

 and wealthier people, rather than be deprived of this luxury from loss 

 of teeth, proceeding from the decrepitude of advanced age, carry with 

 them a small pestle and mortar, by the aid of which they reduced the 

 nuts into a form of powder, and "by occasionally placing small portions 

 on their tongue thus secured all the benefits which would have accrued 

 if the nut had been eaten entire. 



Jobson, an English merchant, who was a resident in the Gambia 

 about 1620, launches forth into fulsome encomiums on their properties, 

 especially so when he relates that, after mastication, they rendered river 

 water so sweet as to make it resemble white wine mixed with sugar, 

 and that its dulcificant powers extended equally to tobacco. Modern 

 experience, however, has not indorsed such extravagant assertions. He 

 further states that six of these seeds were esteemed a present of special 

 consideration, when transmitted to European factors on the Gambia. 

 He also appears to be acquainted with the fact that the Portuguese, even 

 in his day, furnished the inferior course of the river through commu- 

 nicating creeks with this fruit from their factories at Bissao and 

 Cadico, these again being supplied by imports from the fertile regions 

 in the neighbouihood of Sierra Leone and elsewhere. 



Afzelius, in the botanical report previously alluded to, includes 

 among the medicinal plants of the colony the " lamous fruit " of the 

 Kola, which, he observe*, was so highly prized by the natives that they 

 attributed similar remedial virtues to it as to the Peruvian bark ; and 

 a subsequent official report of the African Institution announces that 

 the tonic qualities of these nuts had become so well-known, that the 

 travelling merchants in the vicinity of Sierra Leone had exported them 

 to every portion of the Continent, even into such remote countries as 

 Egypt and Abyssinia 1 



Since that time, few volumes of travels or discoveries in West or 

 Central Africa have been published which do not contain a casual refer- 

 ence to or brief description of its popular appliances, gleaned in most 

 instances from secondary authorities, being merely the old stereotyped 

 phrases referring to its employment to alter or correct the taste of bad 

 and unwholesome water, and allay the sensations of hunger. 



It is certainly remarkable that the Kola-nut, endowed with such a 

 distinctive frame, and such a widely- spread popularity throughout a 

 considerable portion of the African continent, should have gained 

 merely a trivial appreciation, or be so slightly noticed in our botanical 

 treatises. What little they do mention consists', for the most part, of 

 reiterations of worn-out and often incorrect statements, culled from the 

 works of old travellers and others. Some of these authorities go so 

 far as to confidently declare that half-putrid water, by means of the 

 entire or half-chewed seeds deposited in jars, had been converted into 



