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Updated: May 1, 2025
When the coagulum extends to the whole mass, the yellow spots again disappear. Acids precipitate the caoutchouc from the milky juice of the euphorbiums, fig-trees, and hevea; they precipitate the caseum from the milk of animals. A white coagulum was formed in phials closely stopped, containing the milk of the hevea, and preserved among our collections, during our journey to the Orinoco.
The dapicho is certainly not peculiar to the forest that extends from Javita to Pimichin, although that is the only spot where it has hitherto been found. I have no doubt, that on digging in French Guiana beneath the roots and the old trunks of the hevea, those enormous masses of corky caoutchouc,* which I have just described, would from time to time be found.
"And now," said Miss Harson, "the last of these useful trees the cow tree, or milk tree is the most curious one of all. Like the caoutchouc, it is a native of South America; but the sap is a rich fluid that answers for food, like milk. It is a fine-looking tree with oblong, pointed leaves about ten inches in length and a fleshy fruit containing one or two nuts.
The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups, -Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist, in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.
The Indian beat the softened and blackened mass with a piece of brazil-wood, formed at one end like a club; he then kneaded the dapicho into balls of three or four inches in diameter, and let it cool. These balls exactly resemble the caoutchouc of the shops, but their surface remains in general slightly viscous.
In this forest we at length obtained precise information respecting the pretended fossil caoutchouc, called dapicho by the Indians. The old chief Javita led us to the brink of a rivulet which runs into the Tuamini; and showed us that, after digging two or three feet deep, in a marshy soil, this substance was found between the roots of two trees known by the name of the jacio and the curvana.
The tocador or performer brings out soft and pleasing tones with the sides of the thumbs and fingers. The chingufu of East Africa is a hollow box performed upon with a drum-stick of caoutchouc. The pipes are wooden tubes with sundry holes and a bridge below the mouth-piece; they are played over edge like our flutes.
This name is applied to a caoutchouc plantation, the caoutchouc being extracted from the "seringueira" tree, whose scientific name is siphonia elastica. It is said that, by negligence or bad management, the number of these trees is decreasing in the basin of the Amazon, but the forests of seringueira trees are still very considerable on the banks of the Madeira, Purus, and other tributaries.
By its unlikeness to our native combinations of sounds, it makes one think of the West Indies or South America, as do caoutchouc and cacao. Does the word as a matter of fact come from the American Indians? Did we receive, together with the vegetable, the name by which it is known in its native country? Perhaps; but how are we to know?
When dry, the object should be suspended under a glass shade and exposed to a stream of sulphuretted hydrogen gas; or it may be immersed in a solution of 1 part of phosphorus in 15 parts of bisulphide of carbon, 1 part of bees-wax, 1 part of spirits of turpentine, 1 part of asphaltum, and 1/8 part of caoutchouc dissolved in bisulphide of carbon.
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