174 MALAY POISONS AND CHABM CURES 



Charles Campbell very shortly refuted the " travellers* 

 tales " of Foersh, and observed : " As to the tree itself 

 I have sat under its shade, and seen birds alight upon 

 its branches • and as to the story of grass not growing 

 beneath it, everyone who has been in a forest must know 

 that grass is not found in such situations." These facts 

 were corroborated many years later by Vaughan 

 Stevens and Eidley, who by personal experiments also 

 proved that the juice of the tree can be applied to the 

 unbroken skin and can be taken internally by the mouth 

 without producing poisonous effects in human beings. 



Uses. — Hose records that the Punans of Borneo use 

 it as a febrifuge in the form of a decoction, and also apply 

 it to snake bites and festering wounds (Ref. 14, Vol. IL, 

 p. 208). 



The milky sap of the upas tree was formerly used in 

 warfare by Malays as an effective poison for arrows and 

 blowpipe darts. When the siege of Malacca was com- 

 menced in July, 1511, Alfonso Dalbuquerque found that 

 all his Portuguese soldiers who were wounded by 

 poisoned darts died except one man, who was burned 

 with a red-hot ii-on directly after he was pierced, so that 

 ultimately his Hfe was spared. Again, Danvers records 

 that in the second assault on the city, which took place 

 in August, 1511, a number of Portuguese were wounded, 

 and the most fatal cases were those caused by poisoned 

 darts expelled from blowpipes (Ref, 6, Vol. L, p. 228). 

 Arrows and darts poisoned with the latex of Antiaris 

 toxicaria are still used by the pagan tribes of Borneo 

 and Sumatra in mter-tribal warfare. A correspondent 

 writing recently (1915) from Sumatra to the Journal of 

 the Ceylon Agrimltural Society for October states that 

 dm-ing the last inter-tribal war of the interior,*men from 

 the mountains came down to Kwala, a distance of 

 100 miles or more, to collect the juice of the tree for the 



