322 ON THE CULTIVATION OF INDIGENOUS OPIUM. 
I shall show further on the most favourable moment for making 
incisions of the carnation poppy so as to obtain the richest product. 
This long digression was necessary to establish one reason for the 
preference that I accord to the carnation poppy for the extraction of 
opium. 
In first making choice of the purple poppy, it was deemed expedient 
to sacrifice the question of economy, and consequently the commercial 
question, to uniformity in the quality of the opium, which could, how- 
ever, be obtained more easily and more exactly in another way. 
By a singular chance, the opium of the purple poppy, obtained by 
M. Aubergier during five successive years, gave pretty regularly 10 per 
cent, of morphia ; and this coincidence of strength which could not 
fail to excite a lively enthusiasm amongst men who, up to the present 
moment, have desired regularity in the composition and uniformity in 
the strength of the opium employed in medicine. 
But what has resulted from the preference given to the purple 
poppy ? This— that the commercial question has ended there. 
It is, however, possible, I think, to obtain with certainty a constant 
and regular yield of 10 per cent, of morphia without depending entirely 
on the caprices of nature. I believe that it must be with the culture of 
the purple poppy as with other cultures, and the opium of this variety, 
cannot any more than the other products of the soil, give regularly the 
same results. 
Everyone knows, in effect, that the same kinds of wheat, of 
vines, &c, do not give every year produce of the same quality. 
To admit a similar principle we must suppose an identity of cir- 
cumstances which we do not always meet, and above all, a permanence 
of the same atmospheric conditions which are to be met with still more 
rarely. 
It is true that the carnation poppy has been reproached with the 
thinness of its walls, but this objection disappears in using the instru- 
ment which I have invented for making incisions in the poppy head, 
and which only allows the flexible blades of this apparatus to make 
superficial cuts. 
Admitting this, let us now examine seriously the economical, and 
consequently the commercial side of the question of indigenous opium. 
What is the most powerful cause which has hitherto been an obstacle 
to the extraction of opium in an industrial point of view ? 
It is evidently the slow process of incising the heads, the length of 
time that the collecting of the produce requires. But this inconvenience 
is the same for the purple as for the carnation variety, and the incisions 
cannot be made with greater rapidity on one variety than on the other. 
Moreover, the purple poppy scarcely gives as much opium as the 
carnation. That being so, the richness of the carnation opium allows us 
to reduce the price at least one-half per kilogramme of medicinal opium 
containing 10 per cent, of morphia. 
