201 
Unidentified plants mentioned by Vaughan Stevens, are Bal, 
Grow (chow) Choichoi, Lendow, Garsung. 
Ipoh, Antiaris toxicaria, Bl. 
The best known poison of the East Indies is the Ipoh or Upas, 
as it is called in Java, the produce of Antiaris toxicaria, Bl. one 
of the Urticacece- . It is mentioned in almost all of the earlier 
books of travel in the East Indies, and, as will be seen by the list 
of references to the drug, it possesses a considerable amount of 
literature A great deal of the earlier accounts of it were very 
erroneous, notably the account by Foersch whose description 
was for a long time firmly credited, and some of whose blunders 
have only recently been completely exposed/ 
The tree is allied to the Artocarpi and Ficus, and. as in these 
there is abundant milk or latex readily exuded from wounds m 
the bark, but whereas in these the latex contains nothing more 
harmless than Caoutchouc, in Antiaris there is a remarkable 
resin which, on being injected into the blood even in small quan- 
tities, produces a violent action usually speedily terminated by 
death. » ^ 
This property is made use of by the Sakais of the Malay Penin- 
sula, the Muong of Tonkin, the Bataks of Sumatra, and formerly 
by tiie Buginese of Macassar, and the J avanese. The lattei used 
it with great success in war, as may be seen in the account of the 
taking of Malacca by Albuquerque. 
Its use is now confined to the wilder tribes of the East who, 
not possessing fire-arms, poison the darts shot from the blow- 
pipes ( Sumpitan ) with which they kill monkeys and other small 
game. It appears never to be used for poisoning krisses , as is 
popularly supposed, and it is probable that it never was so used. 
A few years ago I noticed that a large number of the expei i- 
ments made with the poison, were made either with the darts 
used by Sakais or with a mixture of several ingredients made by 
them, and, naturally, the results were vitiated by this, and I 
made some experiments with the pure juice, in order to eliminate 
the action of the other poisons used in the preparation. At that 
time, too, specimens of the unmixed juice had been sent to Kew 
for analysis and experiment, and it was stated that the latex 
contained no poisonous properties. The fact is, however, that 
fresh extract, unless very carefully dried, putrefies in a few days, 
evolving sulphuretted hydrogen, so that the specimens sent to 
Kew had decomposed ere their arrival. I had intended to expe- 
riment further with the drug, but the large tree in the Botanic 
Gardens died, and the others were too young to anoid sufficient 
l3,tGX» 
As already mentioned the Sakais use a number of other ex- 
tracts with the Antiaris for the dart-poison, including a prepara- 
tion from the bark of at least one species of Strychnos. Of many 
of these, I received specimens and sketches from the late Pro- 
fessor Hr. Vaughan Stevens, who published an account of them 
in a German periodical. 
