CINCHONA BARK. 



Ill 



admiring or making love to each other. The forest stretches down the 

 side of the Madeira Plata. The woods are ornamental and dye ; the 

 cacao tree, from which the best chocolate is made, grows wild. Coffee, 

 tobacco, cotton, with all the tropical fruits, and the coca plant, are 

 cultivated. 



In the beds of the streams grains of gold are found. Among the 

 hills there are two species of the cinchona bark, the best in the world. 

 The forest is common to all persons who choose to employ themselves 

 in gathering bark, and the impression is that the value of the forest in 

 this article of trade is annually decreasing. The bark taken from the 

 trunk of the tree " tabla" is the best ; that from the larger branches, 

 " charque," second in quality ; and that from the smaller or upper 

 branches, " canulo," the least valuable. A man may cut two quintals 

 per day, which makes one quintal (one hundred pounds) when dried 

 ready for market. The woodman will sell it at the stump of the tree at 

 from eight to ten dollars the quintal. 



By law of Congress, all bark gathered in Bolivia must be sold to a 

 company having the monopoly of this trade, who pay, according to law, 

 the following prices to the Yungas woodsman for his cinchona bark, 

 carried over the lofty Andes and delivered at the bank in La "Paz : 

 " tabla," sixty dollars per quintal ; " charque," thirty-five dollars, and 

 "canulo," thirty dollars. The company pay twenty- five dollars per 

 quintal on "tabla," and eighteen dollars upon " charque" and "canulo," 

 duty to the government. 



The bark is put up in cotton bales, each weighing one hundred and 

 fifty pounds, covered with raw hide. Two bales, or three hundred 

 pounds, being a mule load over the Cordilleras to the sea-port of Arica, 

 where it arrives in ten days from La Paz, paying a freight of twelve 

 dollars per mule load, so that a quintal of " tabla" has cost the company 

 eighty-nine dollars. 



Tj^e price in Arica varies from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars 

 per quintal, according to the demand for quinine in fever and ague 

 countries. In 1851 it was worth one hundred and ten dollars the 

 quintal ; in May, 1852, it was as low as eighty dollars. At Arica it is 

 shipped, and carried around Cape Horn, to the chemists in the United 

 States and Europe, where it is manufactured, bottled, and some of it re- 

 shipped and sold in the apothecary stores of La Paz to those who enter 

 the province of Yungas, where the disease for which it is intended as a 

 specific frequently prevails. The woodsman pays for one ounce of 

 quinine the same price he sold one quintal of bark for at the tree. 



Those who swallow quinine throughout the world are supposed to 



