Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/528

512 a rooting, as the soil is covered to a depth of ten to twenty inches with loose, decaying leaves. Beyond all doubt, the cinchonas might be successfully cultivated in their native country, especially in the exhausted forests; but the natives show no enterprise, and foreigners receive no encouragement from the governments to attempt it. Two Germans have recently made a venture at cultivating cinchonas near the city of La Paz, Bolivia, but as yet the plants are not sufficiently developed to determine the results.

The almost continuous revolutions and wars in those South American countries so unsettle everything as to render investments hazardous; the roads and ports are sometimes blockaded for months, preventing the importation of goods or shipment of barks, often entailing heavy losses upon the dealers.

In case of war or revolution, every Indian peon is subject to military duty, and, if required, is forced to enter the army; sometimes it is impossible to obtain sufficient cascarilleros to make it pay to enter the forests; hence it is that political troubles in those countries so greatly influence the price of bark and quinine.

The efforts of the Dutch and British Governments in taking energetic and extensive measures, by establishing vast plantations of cinchona-trees in their eastern colonies, to insure against the possibility of the world's bark-supply becoming exhausted, are therefore of paramount importance; and it is a matter of general concern and gratification that their experiments are proving from year to year more successful, yielding an excellent, ever-increasing supply of bark, mostly rich in valuable cinchona alkaloids.

 

ROFESSOR A. KIRCHHOFF has published, in the "Transactions of the Geographical Society of Halle," an interesting description of a party of Nubians who came to that city with the caravan of Messrs. Rice and Hagenbeck. The traveler Marno, in his "Journey into the Egyptian Equatorial Provinces and in Kordofan," gives a flattering account of the handsome forms and features of the youth of the nomadic people of those provinces, with the faces of the boys so fine and soft that one might be made to doubt whether they may not be girls. These handsome traits disappear as the youth grow older, and give way to repulsive ones, especially among the women. One of the most striking peculiarities among the men of the Bishareen and Hadendoah is their manner of wearing the hair. After being worked up into a great tuft on top of the head, it is smeared as thickly as possible with tallow, which, melting under the warmth of 