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The study of the decomposition products of the cinchona alkaloids especially points quite distinctly to the probable existence in quinine of a hydrogen addition product of pyridine, in combination with a methyl-quinoline group. The many experiments that are now being made to test this and other questions that suggest themselves, will not long leave us in the dark.
Cassia is another species of cinnamon, and its oil is often substituted for the true oil; and very likely you buy it ground for the real thing." The experts explained some other plants, especially cinchona, one of the most valuable medicinal plants, from which Peruvian bark, quinine, and other drugs are made, in which the three doctors were much interested.
It is doubtful whether the aboriginal inhabitants of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador were acquainted with the virtues of the cinchona plant as a febrifuge. It seems probable, nevertheless, that the Indians of Loxa, two hundred and thirty miles south of Peru, were aware of the qualities of the bark, for there its use was first made known to Europeans.
"At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, senora," he answered, "there is a small steamer loading with cinchona and dyewoods. She sails for San Francisco to-morrow at sunrise. So says my brother, who arrived in his sloop to-day, passing by Punta Reina." "You must take me in that sloop to that steamer to-night. Will you do that?" "Perhaps " Mateo shrugged a suggestive shoulder. Mrs.
But, attractive though the city is, it holds nothing of particular interest to the casual visitor unless it be the quinine factory. This company seems likely to succeed in cornering the supply of Javanese cinchona bark and is fast building up a world market for its product.
Sugar-cane grows wild from sea to mountain; wild oranges, lemons, and limes can be had for the picking; and land adapted for growing rice, coffee, tobacco, rubber, cocoanuts, and cinchona is plentiful. There are mountain summits clad in everlasting snow, healthful plateaus abounding in delightful scenery, and dank coast plains in which lurks the deadly jungle fever.
But what microscope or what alembic shall ever tell us why a collection of tubes and cells in one tree creates the most wholesome and delicious fruit, while in another an organization precisely similar, so far as we can discern, produces only harsh and poisonous berries? why the acacia tribe elaborate their gum, the pine family turpentine, the almond prussic acid, the sorrels oxalic acid? why the tall calisaya-tree of the Andes deposits in its bark the valuable medicine cinchona, and the oak, the hemlock, the tea-plant, and many others, make use of similar repositories to lay up stores of tannic acid?
A native planting tea, sugar, coffee, maize, cinchona, etc., to be allowed a bounty, and when returns arrived to be allowed so much per pound sterling. All these things to be superintended by the said officer. "Traders would soon swarm, but no one should be allowed to trade with natives directly, but only through the Government.
Nay, I will venture to say this, that if every specific were to fail utterly, if the cinchona trees all died out, and the arsenic mines were exhausted, and the sulphur regions were burned up, if every drug from the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdom were to disappear from the market, a body of enlightened men, organized as a distinct profession, would be required just as much as now, and respected and trusted as now, whose province should be to guard against the causes of disease, to eliminate them if possible when still present, to order all the conditions of the patient so as to favor the efforts of the system to right itself, and to give those predictions of the course of disease which only experience can warrant, and which in so many cases relieve the exaggerated fears of sufferers and their friends, or warn them in season of impending danger.
I confess that at that time I knew no more about that admirable prophylactic than the Queen of Sheba knew about dry-fly fishing, and had not the faintest idea of how quinine was made. Vieweg, warming to his subject, explained to me that the cinchona bark was treated with lime and alcohol, and informed me that his father now obtained the bark from Java instead of from South America as formerly.
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