October 19,1372.] THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS, 
SOI 
THE BOTANICAL ORIGIN AND CHARAC¬ 
TERS OF THE OFFICINAL RHUBARBS. 
By the courtesy of Dr. J. Leon Soubeiran we 
have been favoured with the following extracts from 
a communication made by Professor Baillon, in the 
recent session of the French Society for the Advance¬ 
ment of Science, held at Bordeaux. 
The fine officinal rhubarbs which are known by 
the names of Russian and Chinese rhubarbs, appear 
to be the product of a single botanical species, 
growing in Thibet, about the 40th degree of latitude, 
in deserts, which have usually been looked upon as 
vast plateaux of sand, but which are really inac¬ 
cessible citadels, formed of superposed stages of 
perpendicular rocks, the craggy buttresses of which 
have been but seldom, and then with difficulty, scaled 
by Europeans. It was thence that about the year 
1808 M. Dabry procured some stalks of the true 
officinal rhubarb. How he procured these plants 
is not known, but probably they were carried oft* by 
a Chinese workman from land devoted to the 
lamaseries, from which the common people are scared 
by terrible imprecations. 
Boerhaave and Pallas, like the explorers of 
the Meikong in our own time, appear not to have 
known the true rhubarb except from the accounts of 
the dealers who transported it from Thibet, either 
to Iviatcha, the principal mart for it in Russia, or 
to China. Linnaeus, however, was pretty near the 
mark when he wrote that the Asiatic rhubarb grew 
u ad murum Chinee," although the real locality is 
doubtless further east. But it has long been known 
that the plant is furnished with palminerved or 
digitinerved leaves, which are deeply incised on the 
margin. This has induced authors to tliink that the 
finest quality of the Asiatic drug is produced by a 
species in the same group as Rheum hyhridum, 
probably by R. palmatum. Guibourt also arrived 
at this opinion after having cultivated and studied in 
Paris all the species of Rheum which he could obtain. 
But M. G. Planchon has shown that the roots of 
R. palmatum, as they are found in Guibourt’s col¬ 
lection, do not present the histological characters of 
the Chinese or Russian rhubarbs of commerce. 
Hitherto but little attention has been paid to what 
is said respecting the rhubarb plant by the authors 
of the Chinese “ Pun-tsaou,” namely, that the leaves 
are “ green during the first month, and that when 
well developed they are as large as a fan, and 
resemble those of the Ricinus communis; ” also, that 
the stem is ^ery large, one to two feet long, covered 
with a black bark, soft, humid, and containing a yellow 
sap-wood. These characters are very perceptible 
in a plant sent by M. Dabry toM. Soubeiran, in the 
putrified mass of which some shoots were found still 
intact by M. L. Neumann. These shoots carefully 
cultivated have produced some plants, one of which 
has flowered with M. Giraiuleau, in the valley of 
Montmorency, and another is cultivated in the Gar¬ 
den of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris. It has 
there produced leaves of about a metre and a half in 
length, and of which the limb, a little broader than 
long, is orbicular, deeply five-lobed, and incised, 
cordate at the base, pale green, glabrous above! 
densely covered underneath by a fine white down, 
which does not alter the green tint. In the in¬ 
florescence, the bracts of about two metres in length, 
ramified, foliate, and bare at the summit, are sur¬ 
mounted by numerous cymes of whitish flowers, 
Third Series, No. 121. 
remarkable for the depth of their concave recepta¬ 
cles and the green colour of their disks. The aerial 
portion of the axis of this plant, for which the name 
of Rheum officinale is proposed, is a thick, short, 
ramified stem, whilst the subterranean portions are 
cylindrical, of small size,—therefore of little practi¬ 
cal use,—and easily destroyed, from which cause it is 
rarely, and in but small quantity, imported into Europe. 
This is the reverse of what is found in the European 
rhubarbs, of which the fuller developed root is the 
part usually employed, together with a small portion 
of the stem, But in the Thibet rhubarb the part 
principally employed is the aerial stem or 
branches. Hence the peculiar characters of this 
drug as it is generally met with in commerce. It is 
characterized by its colour, smell and taste—found 
in the living plant from Thibet—and by the numerous 
starred spots which are observed in sections of cer¬ 
tain portions. The pretended black bark which is 
removed in cleaning this rhubarb is nothing but a 
mass of leaf bases and of oclireas which cling to 
the surface of the stem. As the stems of Rheum 
which have been planted in France comport them¬ 
selves as true sympods, on the surface of which 
there are not only leaves, but also axillary buds, it 
is not astonishing that these buds, separated from 
the mother-plant, readily develope adventitious roots, 
allowing of their easy reproduction. Thus the 
future is assured of a large number of stalks of this 
plant, handsome in an ornamental point of view, 
and susceptible of being successfully cultivated in 
France in the open air, where it has already sup¬ 
ported a winter of 20°. 
The radiated spots in rhubarb are really trans¬ 
verse sections, more or less oblique, of adventitious 
roots, which penetrate from the base of the root into 
the parenchymatous mass of the stem, where they 
appear as a pith of medullary rays, with triangular 
portions of parenchyma and wood interposed. This 
makes it practically possible always to distinguish 
the rhubarbs met with in commerce consisting of the 
cauline portions of the plant from those consisting of 
the root. 
THE MICROSCOPE I NT PHARMACY, 
BY HENRY POCKLINGTON. 
{Continued from p. 283.) 
Turmeric. —This is a convenient jilace in which to 
notice the structure of turmeric so far as is sufficient 
to enable us to detect its presence in the form of 
powder in such articles as mustard, where it is a 
tolerably common adulterant. The general structure 
of the turmeric tuber is reticulate in cross section, 
with a few isolated vascular bundles of one to three 
barred vessels and enveloping wood fibres. The 
walls of the parenchymatous cells are thinner than 
those of ginger, the wood fibres are not so long, and 
apparently unpitted. The chief characteristic is the 
great quantity of the colouring matter contained 
within the cells of the parenchyma. This colouring 
matter appears to be dissolved in the nitrogenous 
cell contents from which it can readily be removed 
by maceration in water and glycerine, leaving the 
other cell contents pretty nearly uncoloured and 
withdrawn from the bounding walls of the cell. A 
more intensely yellow colouring matter is contained 
within special receptacula, large parenchymatous 
