330 Proceedings of Societies. 
VI. Notice of the Cinchona Cultivation on the Neilgherry Hills. 
By Dr Hugh Cleghorn. 
The cultivation of Cinchona, or the Peruvian bark plant, is likely to 
supply a new produce for the trade of India. Mr Vincent, an enterpris- 
ing planter, has secured 5000 Cinchona plants for the land he has pur- 
chased, and M. de Facien, an enterprising planter, has secured as many 
more. Altogether, the orders on record exceed the number of plants Mr 
M‘lIyor (the superintendent of the Ootacamund garden) will be able to 
supply at the close of the current official year, which we understand will 
be 34,000. The plants available in the course of the next year, or from 
May 1863 to April 1864, are estimated at 100,000. This will be out of 
the Government nurseries, but the settings from their own stock, which 
planters in the meantime will have been able to rear, will be something 
considerable, for a single plant, some six feet high, in the public garden 
here, has given Mr M‘Ivor no less than 900 cuttings, each the 
.nucleus of a healthy sapling now, with the promise of a gigantic forest 
tree hereafter. ‘The enormous source of wealth to which the Cinchona 
points, is actually derived from bricks. When a shoot is taken off a 
plant, it is immediately placed in a pot filled with brick dust. Hundreds, 
nay thousands of these pots may be seen in Mr M‘Ivor’s conservatories, 
covered with what look like nothing more than diminutive leaves thrust 
into them. Here the shoots are allowed to remain till they recover from 
the shock attending their severance from the parent stem. They are 
then transferred to pots charged with a mixture of decomposed felspar 
and garden mould, in which the process of rooting goes on. Several 
acres of shola land in the vicinity of the Government garden have been 
planted, and there can be no doubt that wherever the shade of a forest 
tree has fallen upon the interesting suckling below, it has pined and 
withered, or been stunted. The instances of this effect in a romantic 
glen to which Mr M‘Ivor will cheerfully lead visitors are very remarkable. 
At a few yards from the umbrage of a group of trees, the plants look ex- 
ceedingly flourishing, but their healthfulness, size, and vigour diminish 
in proportion to their approximation to shade. Some plants, which were 
put out in the Government garden in various positions a year ago, fully 
bear out this result. Those in the shade look sickly, and those subjected 
to drippings look worse. Mr M‘Ivor does not consider the Ootacamund 
plantation a complete demonstration of his principles, that at Neddiwattum 
being more corroborative of his views; but any one knowing the difference 
between a healthy and a sickly plant, must at once acknowledge that 
shade is not the condition for the active development of the Cinchona. 
There are, of course, other important particulars connected with the ulti- 
mate success of the Cinchona in India which must be left to time and ex- 
periment to establish. We might mention the earliest period of growth 
at which the alkaloids begin to show themselves,—the efficacy of decoctions 
and infusions made from dry bark and leaves compared with their virtue 
when prepared with fresh specimens,—and the possibility of dispensing in 
a large measure, if not entirely, with the expensive manufactured article, 
quinine, in the event of bark and leaf possessing sufficient curative pro- 
perties to be exhibited in most forms of fever disease. One or more ot 
these points, accompanied with the requisite materials for arriving at cor- 
rect results, will, we believe, be shortly submitted for decision in England. 
A very interesting feature io the habitude of the Cinchona plant is its 
power of reproducing its bark, when deprived of it, to a greater thickness 
than the original formation. This peculiarity, we learn, has been noticed 
by Mr M‘Ivor, after covering the denuded parts with moss for a month 
