28 
WAT. ORDER. CINCHONACEiE. 
South America; growing for the most part among mountainous re- 
gions, difficult of access, and in other respects affording but httle en- 
couragement to the scientific traveller. To this cause we may ascribe 
our comparative want of information respecting one of the most 
valuable remedies which the vegetable world has yet offered to 
mankind. Recent events added to the valuable labors of pharma- 
ceutical chemistry, and the present enterprise and improvement in ■ 
that science, will, it is hoped, soon bring us better acquainted with 
the botanical characters of those of cinchona, to which medicine is 
so much indebted. We. believe the fact to be well established, that 
there are many species of this tree, which yield a bark partaking 
more or less of the properties that distinguish the peruvian hark 
of commerce, although the destinctive characters of these species 
are still a desideratum in our botanical works. Riz and Pavon have 
described fifteen species native of Peru and Chili, and seven have 
been found by Mutis, a very celebrated botanist of Cadiz, who v/ent 
to Santa Fe in 1760, as physician to the Viceroy, Don Pedro Misa 
de la Cerda, which he found in the forest near Gruduas. It is now 
known that very many more remain undescribed. The Edinburgh 
College formerly enumerated three varieties of the Peruvian, viz.: 
the common or pale hark, the red and the yellow ; but it has long 
since been ascertained by both Spanish and American botanists, 
that these barks not only belong to distinct species, but that, prob- 
ably, each of them is taken indiscriminately from several distinct 
species. In the history of sciences, it often happens that the per- 
son who knows how to diffuse, with a certain degree of boldness, 
the discovery of another, passes for the discoverer himself^ instead 
of him who made the discovery. 
Sensible Pi-operties. The recent discoveries of the French 
chemists, M. M. Caventou and Polletrer supersede all the previous 
researches, so far as medicine is concerned, into the nature of cin- 
chonas. Vanquelin ascertained that there were three, if not four, 
classes of cinchona-hark, differing essentially in their chemical con- 
