406 THE URARI, OR ARROW POISON OF THE INDIANS. 
will receive the support of Government, and therefore become 
law, unless metropolitan dairymen can prove by facts that 
they have firmly resolved to sweep the seeds of pestilence 
from their establishments. We are anxious to see the progress 
of improvement with the least possible injury to trade, 
consistent with the higher interests of public health and 
social economy ; and we invite our correspondents to com- 
municate to us facts on either side of the question, which can 
tend to facilitate its solution in the most speedy, most efficient, 
and least unpleasant manner. — The Field . 
THE URARI, OR ARROW POISON OF THE INDIANS OF 
GUIANA. 
By Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Ph.D. 
I published after my return from Guiana, in the ‘ Annals 
of Natural History/ some remarks on the urari poison of 
the Indians of that territory, principally as prepared by the 
Macusis, who occupy the open country between the rivers of 
white waters, namely, the Rupununi, Takutu, and Parima, 
or Rio Branco. The latitude 2° and 3° north, and the longi- 
tudes 59° and 6l° west from Greenwich, circumscribe the 
country over which their settlements are dispersed, com- 
prising about 21,000 square miles. 
My former observations, and the experiments which I had 
made with this poison, were reawakened by the perusal of 
some remarks in the £ Journal de Pharmacie et de Chimie, 
which induce me to state again my opinion on the true nature 
of this terrible substance. 
As many of the readers of the Transactions of the Phar- 
maceutical Society may not be acquainted with the prepara- 
tion, nature, and effect of the urari, I trust it may not be 
considered a useless repetition to give a general outline of 
what I have previously stated in this regard in the ‘Annals 
of Natural History. 5 The active principle of this, the most 
dangerous of all poisons, seems still enveloped in obscurity. 
It has been so for centuries past. Although the first dis- 
coverers of the New World made it already known that the 
aborigines employed different substances to poison their 
arrows, the action of that poison seems to have been very 
different from that of the urari. Oviedo, the contemporary 
of Columbus, who passed many years in the New World, and 
