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Thomas of Angostura, as an excellent cinchona; and on the other hand, the bark of the common cherry tree, which has scarcely any febrifuge quality, yields a green precipitate like the real cinchonas. Leaving the ravine which descends from the Imposible, we entered a thick forest traversed by many small rivers, which are easily forded.
The teeth of the whole party were chattering like a concert of castanets. The sun, like a practical joker, laughed ironically at the general picture. The first hours of morning were consecrated to a general examination of the stores, especially the precious specimens of cinchona.
Had Alexander the Great, who died of the common remittent fever of Babylon, been acquainted with cinchona bark, his death would have been averted and the partition of the Macedonian empire indefinitely postponed. Oliver Cromwell was carried off by an ague, which the administration of quinine would easily have cured.
But the late Mr. MacIvor, superintendent of the Government Cinchona plantations on the Nilgiri hills, has tested the value of northern and southern aspects in a way which accurately judges their respective values.
Presently Leon returned from the woods, and was shown the trap in full operation; but Leon, upon this day, was full of adventures that had occurred upon the hills to himself, Guapo, and Don Pablo. In fact, he had hastened home before the others to tell his mamma of the odd incidents to which he had been a witness. That morning they had discovered a new mancha of cinchona trees.
M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
The most practical reminder of the quest of cinchona which the travelers found was an occasional ajoupa alone in the wilderness, with a broken pot and a rusted knife or axe beneath it witness that some eager searcher had traveled the road before themselves.
Assisted by a number of other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the Academy of Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed to them.
The article of chief value for rubber had not then come into prominence was the quinquina, or cinchona bark, at first considered peculiar to the territory of Loxa, but subsequently found to exist at Bogotá, Riobamba, and many other parts of New Granada.
The Portuguese, however, informed me that they had the cinchona bark growing in their country that there was a little of it to be found at Tete whole forests of it at Senna and near the delta of Kilimane. It seems quite a providential arrangement that the remedy for fever should be found in the greatest abundance where it is most needed.
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