546 
On  Officinal  Rhubarbs. 
f  Am.  Jour.  Pharm.. 
\     Dec.  1, 1872. 
BOTANICAL  ORIGIN  AND  CHARACTERS  OF  THE  OFFICINAL. 
RHUBARBS. 
By  the  courtesy  of  Dr.  J.  Leon  Soubeiran  we  have  been  favored 
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  Rus- 
sian and  Chinese  rhubarbs,  appear  to  be  the  product  of  a  single  bo- 
tanical 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  inaccessible  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  1868  M.  Dabry  procured  some  stalks 
of  the  true  officinal  rhubarb.  How  he  procured  these  plants  is  not 
known,  but  probably  they  were  carried  off  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  Ki- 
achta,  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  "  ad  murum  Chinee"  although  the  real  locality  is  doubt- 
less further  east.  But  it  has  long  been  known  that  the  plant  is  fur- 
nished with  palminerved  or  digitinerved  leaves,  which  are  deeply  in- 
cised on  the  margin.  This  has  induced  authors  to  think  that  the 
finest  quality  of  the  Asiatic  drug  is  produced  by  a  species  in  the  same 
group  as  Rheum  hybridum,  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  Gui- 
bourt's  collection,  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  of  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  Rici- 
nus  communis ;"  also,  that  the  stem  is  very  large,  one  to  two  feet 
