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On seeing the leaves, I stated that it was not the 'Cinchona longifolia' from which it is supposed the quinine of commerce is extracted, but the name and properties of this bark made me imagine that it was a cinchonaceous tree. I could not get the flower, but when I went to Senna I tried to bring away a few small living trees with earth in a box. They, however, all died when we came to Kilimane.
Plantations of tea, coffee, cinchona, &c., and the cultivation of jute have added within the last 25 years some £30,000,000 a year to the value of Indian exports. Jute alone covers the whole of the so-called "drain." The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural population of India have remained miserably poor.
The land secured, contracts are made with natives of the lower class to clear the forest and plant cinchona. The contracts are often sublet to Indians. The young plants are planted from five to six feet apart, with banana trees between, on account of their rapid growth and the shade the latter afford.
The next morning, two handsome Sandalwood ponies were brought round, and H took me over the estate. We rode between coffee and cinchona plantations on roads of various widths cut in zigzags or curves up the mountain sides, sometimes with the sun blazing full above us, sometimes shaded by the light foliage of the albizzias, until we reached a rough stone monument which marked the highest point.
In the five years 1866-1870 the Government profit on sugar amounted to rather more than 25,000,000 florins. Subsequently the cultivation of coffee, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, pepper, tea, and cinchona was added to that of sugar. The system pursued was not identical in the case of all produce. Cochineal, indigo, tea, and tobacco were cultivated in a manner similar to that adopted for sugar.
Those by which the sulphate of iron is precipitated of a green colour, like the real cinchona, the bark of the white willow, and the horned perisperm of the coffee-tree, do not on this account denote identity of chemical composition;* and that identity might even exist, without our concluding that the medical virtues were analogous.
It has been found, after long and carefully-conducted experiments, that the lower mountains of Perak are admirably suited for the growth of tea, cinchona, and Arabian coffee, while Liberian coffee grows equally well on the lower lands.
The views were extremely grand, and the distances from peak to peak so immense that the mind was almost lost to detail. Much of the land is cleared of forest trees and covered with tea-plants: cinchona also is cultivated, and with great success. It serves as a boundary-line between Bengal and Sikkim.
It is found that cinchona will thrive in the mountain districts, considerably above the height at which coffee ceases to be advantageously cultivated, while, unlike tea or coffee, it requires no special care after it has been once fairly started. The production of quinine, which has now reached mammoth proportions, hardly keeps pace with the growing consumption of the drug by the world at large.
At length, all things being ready, Don Pablo and party set out for a day's work among the cinchonas. As it was the first day of bark-gathering all went along to enjoy the novelty of the thing. A "mancha" of the cinchona trees was not far off, so their journey would be a short one.
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