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Updated: May 13, 2025
All the white and newly prepared caoutchouc, as well as the waterproof cloaks, manufactured in Spanish America by placing a layer of milk of hevea between two pieces of cloth, exhale an animal and nauseating smell. This seems to indicate that the caoutchouc, in coagulating, carries with it the caseum, which is perhaps only an altered albumen.
Guided by the experiments of Fourcroy and Vauquelin on the juice of the hevea, I mixed a solution of carbonate of soda with the milk of the papaw. No clot is formed, even when pure water is poured on a mixture of the milk with the alkaline solution. The membranes appear only when, by adding an acid, the soda is neutralized, and the acid is in excess.
Sprays of pale flowers blossom upon it in August, followed in a few months by pods containing three speckled seeds which look like smooth, slightly flattened nutmegs. When the seeds are ready to drop the outer covering of the pod bursts with a loud report, the seeds shooting in all directions. This is Nature's clever scheme to spread the Hevea family.
The humidity of the soil seems to account for the undulating form of the edges of the dapicho, and its division into layers. I often observed in Peru, that on pouring slowly the milky juice of the hevea, or the sap of the carica, into a large quantity of water, the coagulum forms undulating outlines.
It is perhaps the development of a vegetable acid which then furnishes oxygen to the albumen. The formation of the coagulum of the hevea, or of real caoutchouc, is nevertheless much more rapid in contact with the air.
Sometimes the Indians dig in vain at the foot of dead trees; at other times the dapicho is found beneath the hevea or jacio still green. The substance is white, corky, fragile, and resembles by its laminated structure and undulating edge, the Boletus ignarius.
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.
This extravasation takes place more especially when the trees have attained a great age, and the interior of the trunk begins to decay. The bark and alburnum crack; and thus is effected naturally, what the art of man performs for the purpose of collecting the milky juices of the hevea, the castilloa, and the caoutchouc fig-tree.
About a third of the way up the Amazon River he placed in her hold several thousand carefully packed seeds of the Hevea Braziliensis, or rubber tree. Let Wickham, himself, tell how he surmounted the next difficulty: "We were bound to call in at the city of Para as the port of entry, in order to obtain clearance papers for the ship before we could go to sea.
One of these Frenchmen, La Condamine, wrote of a tree called "Hevea" "There flows from this tree a liquor which hardens gradually and blackens in the air." He found the people of Quito waterproofing cloth with it, and the Amazon Indians were making boots which, when blackened in smoke, looked like leather.
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