1832.] ISLAND OF JAVA. 319 
Not a vestige of vegetable life is to be seen within the contami- 
nated atmosphere ; not even a solitary spear of grass ; and that 
even the fishes die in the water. But even of the progenitors of 
this finny tribe he gives us no information. The divinity of 
Darwin's muse has consecrated this fable in the following beauti- 
ful lines : — 
" Fierce, in dread silence, on the blasted heath, 
Fell Upas sits, the hydra-tree of death ! 
Lo, from one root, the envenomed soil below, 
A thousand vegetative serpents grow ! 
In shining rays, the scaly paonster spreads 
O'er ten square leagues his far diverging heads ; 
Or in one trunk entwists his tangled form. 
Looks o'er the clouds, and hisses in the storm ; 
Steep'd in fell poison, as his sharp teeth part, 
A thousand tongues in quick vibration dart ; 
Snatch the proud eagle, towering o'er the heath, 
Or pounce the Hon as he stalks beneath ; 
-Or strew, as martial hosts contend in vain, 
' With human skeletons the whitened plain." 
But as even the classic fictions of antiquity, when figuratively 
and rightly understood, have their origin in truth, so has this more 
modern Dutch fable of the hohun upas. Vegetable poisons, it is 
well known, exist in almost every part of the world, particularly 
in the tropical regions. On the Island of Java there are several 
different species of shrubs and plants which exude matter delete- 
rious to animal life. To each of these the natives have applied 
the appellative upas, which is a word in their language signifying 
poisonous. Thus the uhi itpas, means a poisonous potato ; and 
the seed of a certain tree is called upas bidjee, in English, poison- 
ous seed. But there is a tree, says Dr. Horsefield, common to 
the eastern provinces, and one of the largest trees in the forests 
of J ava, from the sap of which a poison is made, " equal in fa- 
tality, when thrown into the circulation, to the strongest animal 
poisons hitherto known. The tree which produces this poison is 
the anchar, and grows in the eastern extremity of the island. 
The anchar belongs to the twenty-first class of Linnaeus, the 
moncRcia. The stem is cylindrical, perpendicular, and rises com- 
pletely naked to the. height of sixty, seventy, or eighty feet; at 
which height it sends off a few stout branches, which, spreading 
