50 AlilMENTAET PEOPEBTIES OP TliEES 
Id examining the physical properties of animal and vege- 
table products, science displays them as closely linked 
together; but it strips them of what is marvellous, and 
perhaps, therefore, of a part of their charms. Nothing 
appears isolated ; the chemical principles that were believed 
to be peculiar to animals are found in plants ; a common 
chain links together all organic nature. 
Long before chemists had recognized small portions ,of 
wax in the pollen of flowers, the varnish of leaves, and the 
whitish dust of our plums and grapes, the inhabitants of the 
Andes of Quindiu made tapers with the thick layer of wax 
that covers the trunk of a palm-tree.* It is but a few 
years since we discovered, in Europe, caseum, the basis of 
cheese, in the emulsion of almonds ; yet for ages past, in 
the mountains of the coast of Venezuela, the milk of a tree, 
and the cheese separated from that vegetable milk, have 
beers considered as a salutary aliment. How are we to 
account for this singular course in the development of 
knowledge ? How have the unlearned inhabitants of one 
hemisphere become cognizant of a fact which, in the other, 
so long escaped the sagacity of the scientific ? It is because 
a small number of elements and principles differently com- 
bined are spread through several families of plants ; it is 
because the genera and species of these natural families are 
not equally distributed in the torrid, the frigid, and the 
temperate zones; it is that tribes, excited by want, and 
deriving almost all their subsistence from the vegetable 
kingdom, discover nutritive principles, farinaceous and ali- 
mentary substances, wherever nature has deposited them 
in the sap, the bark, the roots, or the fruits of vegetables. 
That amylaceous fecula which the seeds of the cereal plants 
furnish in all its purity, is found united with an acrid and 
sometimes even poisonous juice, in the roots of the arums, 
the Taeea pinnatifida, and the Jatropha manihot. The 
savage of America, like the savage of the South Sea 
islands, has learned to dulcify the fecula, bv pressing and 
separating it from its juice. In the milk of plants, and in 
the milky emulsions, matter extremely nourishing, albumen, 
caseum, and sugar, are found mixed with caoutchouc and 
with deleterious and caustic principles, such as merphine 
* Coroxylon andicola. 
