Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/686

666 virtue; hence an extract from the leaves, either aqueous or alcoholic, is used as a febrifuge. As a tonic, water may be aromatized by a slight infusion of the leaves. A liquor similar to that of mastic can be produced, and the pharmacy gives instructions for making a tonic eucalyptal wine. Some of the species are tapped for the sap, and gum-tree cider is obtained; the leaves of others yield manna. The famous East India kino of commerce, obtained from the Pterocarpus marsupium, a lofty legume growing on the mountains of India, now finds a rival in the Botany Bay kino, the concrete juice of the brown gum-tree (Eucalyptus resinifera), of which it is said that a single tree is capable of furnishing 500 pounds of kino in a year. In a word, in the modern pharmacopœia, eucalyptus, with its many preparations, occupies considerable space. A very interesting instance of what the therapeutist calls "masking" is an application of the oil of eucalypt for the deodorizing and aromatizing of cod-liver oil, thus rendering palatable and even additionally tonic this repulsive medicine.

At the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866, in Australia, Baron von Müller caused to be exhibited, as from the Phyto-Chemical Laboratory of Victoria, tannic acid, gallic acid, pure wood-spirits, pure acetic acid, distilled wood-vinegar, and other products, obtained from several species of eucalyptus. Mr. Bosisto, a chemist of Victoria, sent to the Philadelphia Exhibition the following products of the one species (E. globulus): Essential oil—a tonic, stimulant, antiseptic, anthelmintic eucalyptol, for inhalation in bronchial or throat affections; eucalyptic acid; liquor of eucalyptus globulus—stimulant in ague or low fever; tincture of eucalyptus globulus—stimulant, tonic, antiperiodic; powder of eucalyptus globulus—antiseptic, cataplasma; cigarettes of eucalyptus globulus—disinfectant, employed in bronchial or asthmatic affections. But many mysteries are waiting solution in the laboratory of the pharmacist. New substances are to be discovered, and those already known will be better understood; all which revealings will be as new fruits on this tree of the future.

But let us hear the botanist's story. He says the thing has been a good deal of a bother to him; that he thought these gum-trees of Australia were pretty much like the animals there, specimens of Nature's jokes. Indeed, we find a recent authority saying, "Nine-tenths of the 8,000 species of plants in Australia are unknown elsewhere, and entirely unconnected with the forms of vegetation of any other division of the world." And then to think of the great variety of forms in this one genus, Eucalyptus. In one the leaves, six or seven inches long, are but a quarter of an inch wide, almost grass-like; while the leaves of the messmate, or E. amygdalina, are almond-shape, and nearly as wide as they are long. Those of E. Preissiana are bluntly rounded at the ends (Fig. 1), while the big-berry-gum-tree, E. macrocarpa (Fig. 2), has wide leaves with mucronate points. Compare these with the outline Fig. 3 of E. globulus, with its sickle-shaped leaves, ten