983 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[June 10, 1S71 
. The success of the Portuguese discoveries stimu¬ 
lated the enterprise of other maritime nations; and 
to the endeavours to find a route to the Spice 
Islands are distinctly traceable our own early efforts 
to establish a north-west passage which have now 
such tragic interest for us, and of which we have 
not even yet heard the last. To the same impulse 
is also owing the first circumnavigation of the globe 
by the brave but unfortunate Spaniard Magellan, 
who, by sailing westward, reached, in 1521, the 
northern islands of the Archipelago, known and yet 
possessed by the Spanish as the Philippine Islands. 
Such were some of the great ends attained for the ! 
world by the agency of this commerce. But with 
these the benefits to humanity ceased. It is true | 
that for a time wealth, power and prosperity flowed 
into Portugal. The enhancement in price which j 
naturally accrued on these luxuries, from tedious, - 
difficult and dangerous journeys, and which had' 
averaged at lowest twenty times the original price, 
the Portuguese unjustly continued to demand, and 
Europe was no gainer in this respect by the open¬ 
ing up of the ocean path to the East. 
Thus we find that pepper, when it came to Eng¬ 
land by the tedious and costly journeying already 
described, cost 3 s. 6(7. per pound, or about sixteen 
times its cost in the Malabar market. Under the 
Portuguese it rose to L>\, or eighteen times its prime 
cost. Cloves continued to cost about 10s. 6(7. per 
pound, thirty times tlieir price in the Moluccas, and 
the Venetian merchants for some time even continued 
to compete with their western rivals. Nutmegs and 
mace by way of the Mediterranean, which at one 
time could be bought in the Moluccas for \d. and 
1(7. per pound respectively, cost 4s. 6(7. and 9s. Un¬ 
der the close monopoly of the Dutch, they rose—nut¬ 
megs to 10s. 3^(7. per pound, and mace to £1. 10s. 5(7. 
Thus mace cost in England 730 times what was 
once regarded as its fair value in its native islands ! 
With such enormous sources of profit, the spirit of 
avarice and greed was effectually stirred up, and all 
sense of moderation, uprightness or even decency in 
dealing was forgotten among the western trading 
Powers. The claims of the possessors of the soil 
were never for a minute considered, except in so far 
as they were tools for production of wealthy cargoes, 
or obstructions to the rapacity of the traders, which 
should be treated as men treat noxious weeds in 
their gardens. The history of the three centuries 
which follow the discovery of the Cape passage is 
made up of sickening details, intrigue, meanness 
and bloodshed ; the Portuguese by such means esta¬ 
blished themselves, by like means the Dutch sought 
to supplant them, and we are bound to confess, by the 
same unholy method, our nation also founded" our 
great eastern empire. Honourable trading was 
never thought of. The Pope first divided nearly the 
whole world, known and unknown, between the Spa¬ 
niards and the Portuguese. The Portuguese seized 
their eastern possessions as quickly as distance and 
their limited navy would allow. Their first work 
was to overawe the people by strongly-fortified trad¬ 
ing posts; then the triple work of commerce, con¬ 
version and extermination went on hand in hand. 
Next the Dutch appeared, and dexterously used the 
cowed and terrified people against their original 
oppressors. Codlin, they said, was the friend. Then 
the appearance of the British completed the trian¬ 
gular duel; and, with varying fortunes, they fought, 
separately or any two against any one, till the Por¬ 
tuguese were first in effect driven from the field. 
The Dutch were ultimately driven from Ceylon to¬ 
wards the end of the last century, but their hold 
upon the eastern archipelago was never fairly 
shaken. There, through persevering monopoly and 
other narrow-spirited restrictions, they ultimately 
succeeded in killing the goose that laid the golden 
eggs; and the trade which made the glories of 
Venice and Genoa, and first established the great 
trading communities of the West, is now carried on 
at a loss to the Dutch government. In Ceylon we 
have the same tale to tell; the settlers there also 
were too late in being removed, and the cinnamon 
trade has become insignificant and unheeded. 
Yet we must acknowledge that more powerful 
agencies have been at work than the spirit of mono¬ 
poly. A trade has sprung up with the East which, 
in extent and value, is a hundredfold that of the 
spices. Tea and coffee have supplied a new stimu¬ 
lant in a much more manageable form; they have 
effected a social revolution, and spice, the former 
king of commerce,—a name that lured men even 
more than the charm of gold,—would now little 
more than occupy the capital of one of our great 
merchants; and the trees which were guarded with 
inhuman jealousy, and the roots of which Roman 
conquerors placed with divine honours in the tem¬ 
ples of their gods, may now grow, drop their fruit, 
and wither unheeded in the tangle of tropical forests. 
UVA URSI. 
DY JULIUS JUNG MANN. 
[The author gives a good botanical description of the 
plant and its habitat; he describes the drug, refers to 
its introduction in medicine, and reviews the analyses 
made since 1809 to the present time, then he proceeds 
to his own experiments.] 
A quantity of coarsely powdered TJva ursi leaves was 
exhausted with cold water by percolation, the infusion 
heated to the boiling-point, strained, a greenish floccu- 
lent coagulum of albumen was left on the strainer ; the 
infusion, after having been more concentrated, was treated 
with freshly prepared hydrated oxide of lead, until it 
would no longer produce a precipitate; this was sepa¬ 
rated by a filter. The filtrate, still more concentrated 
by evaporation, was divided into two parts; the first 
was set aside in a warm place to evaporate spontaneously, 
the second was treated with strong alcohol; this pro¬ 
duced a bulky precipitate of gummy matter, which was 
removed by filtration; the alcoholic filtrate was again 
divided into two portions, the first set aside to evaporate 
spontaneously, the second evaporated to a syrup and 
then treated with ether ; the different ethereal solutions 
were mixed and evaporated at common temperature. 
The residue consisted of a mass of nearly colourless pris¬ 
matic crystals of considerable size, of a bitter slightly 
acrid taste, with a small quantity of resinous matter of 
peculiarly disagreeable odour adhering—ericolin. 
They could be easily purified by either washing them 
with ether, which would dissolve out the resin, or else 
by dissolving them in a small quantity of boiling water, 
filtering and recrystallizing; thus purified from water 
they were inodorous, not near as large, but small needles 
having a silky lustre. 
The alcoholic solution yielded a dark coloured extract 
nearly black; this was redissolved in alcohol and treated 
with animal charcoal, filtered and again evaporated 
spontaneously; yielded, after being pressed and dried, 
yellowish-white crystals of a flocculent character having 
no odour. 
The aqueous solution, which had been set aside in a 
