MarcS 1, 1894.] THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 603 
ful nature, carried their lives in their hands quite as 
much as others of their claes, say the " pioneers" 
whose adventurous inarch into Mnshonaland vras re- 
warded with farms and gold-claims. But the cincbona- 
coUeotorg only brought wealth to others, not to them- 
Belves. Many of then) retarnt d in shattered health ; 
all had braved dsnger, fatigue and hunger, uncom- 
plainingly. Id our otitnary notice of Dr. Spruce we 
refer to the mannerin which his services were rt quited. 
Mr. Ores", who collected seeds of red as well as of 
yellow bark, and who afterwards procured seeds from 
the barks of Oolombii and valuable india-rubber- 
yielding plants, receired two sums of 30VI each for 
hU entire services. Mr. John Weir, who served in the 
espeditions in a more suboriiuiite poeition, has had 
nothing at all, and lives, also crippled for life, on the 
interest of a sum of 600^ subscribed by mpmbers of ths 
Horticultural Society. Mr. Charles Ledger, to whom 
we owe tlie introduction into tba Eist of the most 
valuable of nil cinchonas, has seen his nanie immor- 
talised in that species, but of money he received l one 
whatever. He died some years ago, pcor and old, at 
Tucuman, in Argentina. 
These facts are not new to those few persons 
who are acquainted with the history of the drug in 
a wider sense than that of mere gi owing and telling 
in the market. They are all set forth in Mr. fitments 
Markliam's "Cinchona." But they will probably 
come as a surprise to most of those whose interest 
in the drug has been purely commercial, and into 
whose pockeis the millions profit of the enterprise 
have gone. 
Of the "pioneera" who laid the foundation of the 
cinchoua ioaustry In Java, Dr. Haaskarl, who alone 
was oonceined in the actual procuration of the plant 
in South America, still lives, we believe, in a smal 
German town. Mr. Teysmann, under whose care the 
first plants were grown in Ja'^a, aud Dr. Jungbuhn 
wbo afterwards superintended the cultivation, have 
died lon< since. The evergreen Dr. de Vry, who was 
also prominently associiied with the earliest Java cin- 
chona industry as a chemist, still lives, a hale octo- 
genarian, at the Hague, and reads his Chemist and 
Druggist reRularly. Whether Holland has treated 
the men who did the e%rlie8t rough work for her 
more liberally than Britain treated her servants we 
do not know. 
Now that so miny of those wlio played prominent 
parts in the cinchona industry 35 years ago are 
dead, it would bdof little prnctioHl use to go further 
into the question of the injustice tbat has baen done 
them. As for Dr. Spruce, his demands were always 
modest, and he probably thought himself not tuo 
ill-usod when, afitr much dunning by influential 
friendp, the Government at last raised his pound-a- 
weeb pension to the "living wa^e" of two pounds. 
A tithe of such Buma as many commercial men made 
out of the enterprise of himself and h's colleagues 
would probably Lave over.vhelmed him. The French 
pilot in Browning's poem, who saved bis country's fleet 
from destruction by the Britishers and then, when v 
asked by the King to name his own reward, applied 
for one day's have, and was granted all he asked aud 
nothing more, is the type of men of Dr. Spruce's ralibra. 
Thej, like Cromwell's " russet-coated captains," are 
the sturdy workers upon whom ever the brunt of 
batlle falls, while those wlio stop quietly in their cou' t- 
inghouses or on their estates rake in the shekels, 
i'ortunjtely for this country she has never wanted 
men of tUe type of Kichatd Spruce. Had he never 
betome connected with the cinchona enterprise he 
inight have continued botanieing on the American 
rivers, and returned to rank with Wallace an I Bates 
as a uatnrahst. As it is he has lived forgotten for 
twenty yiiirs, and a little pamgraph in the daily 
papirs is all that has reminded the world of his death. 
55PRVCE.— Dr. kichara iSpruce, a hot mist and ex- 
plorer wlio rendered eminent services to his country 
»B a scientist, and as oce of the chief membirsof the 
South American expedition which rcsultid in the 
Bucc.-ssful eHtablisbmcnt of the Ciuchono indus'ry in 
the eastern lieiumphete, did ou Thursday laht, Dec. 
a^J, %\ OguejBthgrpe, near M*ltjD, Yorkehice, aged 73 
years. Richard Spruce was born at Ganthorpe, iu 
Yorkshire, and from his youth devoted himself with a 
paB^ionate ardour to the science of botany. In 1837, 
when 20 years of age, he made his first attempt at 
literary scientific work in a " List of the Flora of 
the Mallon District," and in the course of the next 
nine years he published a number of botanical papers 
dealing with the Muscology of Great Britain, 
the Killarney district of Ireland, and the 
Pyrenees. Bis work attracted the attention of 
Alexander von Humboldt, who at that time had only 
recently returned from South America, of Sir John 
Hooker, and of the late Earl of Carlisle. Their appre- 
ciation of Dr. Spruce's services assisted him in ob- 
taining an appointment (lom the authorities of Kew 
Gardens as a botanical collector and investigator in 
tropical South America. On June 7th, 1849, Dr. 
Spruce left Liverpool for Para in Brazil, which was 
to be the .starting-point of his expedition, as it had 
been that of Alfred Russell Wallace and H. W. Batea 
only a year earlier. In September 1849, Dr. Spruce, 
still following in the wake of the firstnamed of his 
fellow-scientists, began to work his way up the river 
Amazon, and some of its principal tributaries. This 
journey carried him right into the heart of Northern 
Brazil and to the confines of British Guiana, and 
was productive of most valuable botanical and geo- 
grnphical results. The years 1850 and 1851 were spent 
in botanical exploration on the Rio Negro, anotlu-r 
tributary of the Amazon, and in November 1851 Dr. 
Spruce, in a boat measiniug about nine tons, fifed 
up by him expressly for that expedition, started for 
the head waters of the Rio Negro river, leading to 
that unknown no-man's-land between Venezuela, 
Ecuador and Brazil, when", three centuries earlier, 
the Spanish conquistadoi'es tf Peru placed the mythical 
cinnamon coun ry, in the vain seirch of which to 
many brave Castillians lost their lives. From 1852 to 
the end of 1854 Dr. Spruce explored these regioup, 
never visited by white men before, or forgotten since 
the days of the Pizirroa. From the Brazili»n rivers 
he penetrated into Venezuela, where he explored the 
Orinoco and some of itspr.ncipa! tributaries, re-emerging 
into comparative civilisation in Brazil in 1854. Hia 
next voyage was by cue of the newly-started Amaze- 
nisu steamers through Brazil into Peru, and 
thence by foot through the fores's into Ecuador. As 
an instance of the enormous richness of the flora 
which Dr. Spruce had set himself to investigate, it 
may be mentioned that on one of the Peruvian rivers 
he collected no fewer than 250 species of ferns within 
an area measuricg only fifty miles in dismeter. Un 
his Ecuadorian journey Dr. Spruce was forced to 
abandon all his collections and baggage in the forest 
to escape death by stirvation or by drowning, the 
rivers having swollen suddenly by torrential rains. 
January, 1858, fourd the scientist at Ainbato, in 
Ecu'idor, "nd it was in that place that he first became 
associated with ilr. Clements Markham's cinchona 
enterprise. Mr. Markham, having essigned to himself 
the task of procurii g seeds and specimens of the 
calisaya trees of Bolivia, representing the "yellow' 
bark va-iety, had obtained the services of Mr. 
Pritchett tor similar work with regard to the " grey" 
barks of Huanoco, nrd was iookiig round for another 
coadju'or to perform the function of collecting 
the ■' red'' or euccirnbra barks of Ecuador, which 
his attention was ca'Ld to the extraordinary ociu- 
cideuce that the very man whom one would pick out 
of a nation for such a mitsion — Dr. Spruce — already 
happened t" be on the spot at Ambato. The Indian 
Goveruiucut agreed to the doctor's employment, and 
Dr. Spruce, always molest in his requirement-', cha- 
racteristically wrote: — " iNIy present occupation yields 
me about 20/. a month, a-jd as the onti proposed to 
me is of uiuertain duration, I think 30/. a mouth 
is as low as I could rate my service,", besides tha 
expenses incurred in collecting aud transmitting 
tbo plants to Gusyaquil." Singularly eoongb, ths 
Indian-Oovernmeut cid not a tempt to best down the 
bargain, and Dr- Sproce was encased. 
It is almost needless to say that the Republic of 
Ecuador at that period wis in its norniLil condition of 
tuYQluiiouury oouvaUioDF, and tb« fact did a<Jt t«u4 
