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PHARMACOPCEIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS.

qualities naturally became a favorite in Europe in the days of heroicmedication. The early Spanish voyagers learned of its qualities fromthe natives, and in the sixteenth Century carried large quantities toEurope. Monardes (447), in 1565, mentions a cathartic under the nameMechoacan rhubarb, or root, which some believe to have been jalap,but this Flückiger (239) discredits, because Colon, an apothecary ofLyons, in 1619, states that jalap was then newly brought to France.Flückiger also accepts that both drugs were well known in 1610, al-though often confused. Owing to this confusion between the twobulbs, one was called black mechoacan, while the other was known aswhite jalap. Strangely enough, the exact botanical source of jalapremained a question until 1829, when Dr. Coxe, of Philadelphia,author of Coxe's American Dispensatory, identified the drug from liv-ing plants sent to him from Mexico, and published descriptions, withcolored plates, in the American Journal of Medical Sciences, 1829.This celebrated cathartic, so much used by licensed physicians and indomestic medication, is to be credited to the natives of Central America,whose employment of the drug introduced it to European commercialadventurers who, as a matter of business, made it known to the profes-sions of medicine and pharmacy.

KINO

Kino is the dried juice of a handsome timber tree, Pterocarpusmarsupium, a native of the southern parts of the Indian Peninsulaand Ceylon. It is also obtained from several other trees which par-take of the qualities of an astringent drug. One of these, Pterocarpusindicus, is a tree of Southern India, the Malay Peninsula, and the Phil-ippine Islands. The drug, .used by natives from time immemorial, wasintroduced into commerce by Fothergill (244), 1757. It came fromthe River Gambia, in Western Africa, where it had been previouslynoticed by Moore (449), who in his "Travels Into the Inland Parts ofAfrica," 1737, mentioned the product under the name kano. MungoPark, 1805, sent specimens of the tree to England, and from that dateAfrican kino has been a regulär product of the English drug market.According to Duncan (202) in the Edinburgh Dispensatory, 1803,kino as found in England was an African product, but he recognizesa variety, indistinguishable from this, coming from Jamaica. In the1811 edition of the same work he asserts that the African drug isout of market, and that the East India Company now supply the mar-ket from Jamaica and New South Wales. It is evident that, as withKrameria, many species and varieties of the tree, native to widelydifferent sections of the world, produce the substance known as kino,which, aside from the East India tree, Pterocarpus marsupium, areaccepted as being very nearly identical with the material yielded bythe kino tree of tropical Africa. Kino is obtained by incising thetree and removing the red jelly as it exudes, then drying it by exposureto the air. It is mildly astringent, and has been used in the manu-facture of wine.

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