Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/120

110 them, the Dutch had chosen a species which was hardly worth growing, and the plantations have been long since uprooted. For some years the English Government confined itself to importing seeds and plants, which died on the passage to India. This was evidently futile, and Sir William Hooker urged a systematic procedure. Mr. Clements Markham, in 1859, was sent to Peru to collect seeds and young trees. When he returned, his precious stores were received at the Gardens, nursed, and transmitted to India with trifling loss. This effort was successful. In the plantations of Bengal, laid out and managed by officers recommended by Sir William Hooker, there were, at the date of the latest report, about five million trees. From Kew cinchona-trees have been distributed also to all parts of the world where there was a chance for successful cultivation. The plantations of Ceylon are only inferior to those of Bengal; in Jamaica the sales of bark exceed £5,000 a year; the tree has been introduced also into St. Helena, Trinidad, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, Queensland, and many other settlements. The output of the cinchona drugs from these sources up to 1880 was 87,704 pounds, which, taking quinine at an average value of two dollars an ounce, would represent $2,806,528.

Ipecacuanha is a plant scarcely less important than cinchona itself. But few members of the vegetable kingdom so absolutely refuse to exist under anything short of perfectly satisfactory conditions. In 1866 Sir Joseph Hooker sent a specimen to the Botanical Gardens at Calcutta, which promptly died. Then a struggle began in which the advantage was now on one side, then on the other. In 1875 the Director of the Calcutta Gardens triumphantly reported that he had one hundred thousand nice young plants, but in 1886 the strain received from Kew direct alone survived—less than five per cent—and all hope of successful cultivation in India has been abandoned long since. Plants had been sent out to Singapore, however, in 1875, # with much more lively confidence, and there perseverance found its reward. Ipecacuanha is established in the Old World at last, and the authorities of Kew may be trusted to diffuse the cultivation. Another instance is Liberian coffee, distributed from Kew to take the place of that grown in the East Indies, which was affected by a fungoid pest, and that of the West Indies, which suffered from the white fly. Liberian coffee, moreover, will thrive in hot and moist situations, where the Arabian variety is unable even to live. It has been introduced in a great many places, but, although its growth is very promising, it has nowhere become the general crop. This imperfect success was another problem for the investigators of Kew, and the solution is now believed to be found in the fact that the treatment proper for the Arabian berry after gathering is not suited to the Liberian, with a widely different pulp.