IN *UrA. 



109 



with him a collection of what seeds he could find. He was 

 iinfortimately very unsuccessful, and obtained seeds of only- 

 very inferior sorts. In ISiMy the Government pnrcbftscd, for 

 less than £50, a small quantity of seed tif a supi>osed variety 

 of C. calisapt sent from America by Blr. Charles Ledger. So 

 Wfll had this spet'ies been propagated that tliere were nearly 

 one million tret?s» worth more than a million and a half of 

 money, in the gardens, raised Irom the seed then purchased. 



It ia woll known that cinchona ia so liable to hybridisation 

 that it is very ditlicult to obtain pure seedlings from the seed 

 even of pure trees, the oiTspriiig containing very often less 

 alkaloidis tlian their parents. An experiment, which hiis proved 

 a great success, was made by Dr. Sloens of grafting on the easily 

 reared and (jnicldy growmg C. mtecimhm stems, shoots from 

 the biglicst alkaloid-yielding trees. They have been found to 

 grow very rapitlly and to reproduce pretty regnlarly the same 

 jat jjxirtion of alkaloids as the trees from which the grafts were 

 cut. Of Mr. Ledger's variety, now raised to the rank of a new 

 speeies by Dr. Moens, the seed-raised trees may be of many 

 degrees of valmi, bnt ail eonttiin a (txr higher percentage of 

 quinine than any other species. I gathered as a memento of 

 my visit some flowers from trees whose bark yielded, with a 

 trace only of any other alkaloid, the extraordinary amount of 

 ten and even thirteen per cent, of pure quinine. Continued 

 cultivation has therefore, it wonld seem, vastly developed 

 the aiiiuunt of qniniue that these Ledgermuas contain, 

 compared with ^vbat they yield in their native forests of 

 BoIiviiU 



The story of how the seed of this priceless tree (which can 

 now be propagated ad Ubitum) reached the Old World ia so in- 

 teresting that I have estrac^ted a few paragraphs from a letter of 

 its introducer, Mr. Charles Ledger, in the Field of Peb. 5, 1881, 

 addressed to his brother, evoked by an account of the Dutch 

 Gardens I had contributed to the same jouoial in 188U: 



" \\'hiie engaged in my alpaca enterprise iu 1856, a Bolivian 

 Indian, Manuel Tncra Maniani, formerly and afterwards a 

 cinchona bark-cutter» was accompanying me with two of his 

 Suns. He accunipanied me in almost all my frequent jtiumeys 

 into the interior, and was very useful in examining the large 

 quantities of cinchona bark and alpaca wool 1 was constantly 



