A.™A^i9?9*m'  ^      Thc  Trade  in  Cinchona  Bark. 
231 
would  restore  the  original  healthy  condition.  This  fundamental 
principle  was  so  obscured  by  fantastic  ideas  and  was  carried  to  such 
extremes  by  overzealous  followers  that  it  fell  into  disrepute  and 
finally  disappeared  entirely,  giving  place  to  a  chemistry  founded  on 
careful  experimentation  rather  than  fanciful  theories.  Strangely 
enough  we  are  now  returning,  but  under  very  different  auspices, 
the  limitations  of  our  knowledge  and  the  fact  that  we  must  not  be 
too  eager  to  draw  conclusions  from  the  isolated  facts  we  know,  but 
as  in  former  days  the  practice  of  pharmacy  and  the  art  of  healing  did 
much  to  develop  chemical  knowledge,  so  to-day  must  chemistry 
in  its  fullest  application  go  far  toward  improving  our  means  of 
treatment  and  control  over  disease. 
Parke.  Davis  and  Company, 
Detroit,  Mich. 
THE  TRADE  IN  CINCHONA  BARK.1 
By  B.  F.  Howard. 
An  article  on  "  The  Future  of  the  Trade  in  Cinchona  Bark"  ap- 
pearing in  the  last  issue  of  the  Bulletin  of  the  Imperial  Inst.2  con- 
tains much  information  of  value  to  those  who  desire  to  have  an 
authoritative  resume  of  this  important  subject. 
An  interesting  introduction  traces  briefly  the  history  of  the  natural 
Cinchonacese  of  the  forests  of  the  Andes,  and  the  botanical  classifi- 
cation of  the  varieties  best  known  on  the  market  at  the  present  day. 
Turning  to  the  production  of  cultivated  bark,  the  author  gives  the 
output  in  recent  years  from  the  plantations  in  the  Dutch  East  Indies, 
India  and  Ceylon,  and  shows  clearly  the  enormously  important  part 
played  by  the  Dutch  plantations  in  Java.  In  recent  years,  Java 
heads  the  list  of  producers  with  an  annual  output  of  22,880,000  lbs., 
India  supplying  2,000,000  and  other  countries  440,000  lbs.  Perhaps 
these  figures  should  be  taken  as  a  general  indication  of  the  pre- 
eminence of  Java  rather  than  as  an  exact  comparison,  for  whereas 
the  Java  production  is  based  on  an  average  of  the  years  1911-1913, 
the  Indian  output  given  is  the  average  of  the  years  1912-1913  to 
1915-1916,  and  this  must  surely  have  been  affected  by  the  difficulties 
of  production  and  shipping  during  the  war. 
1  Reprinted  from  lour.  Soc.  of  Chem.  Industry,  February,  1919. 
2  XVI,  Pt.  3,  1918. 
