TUBER CHINE. Radix China; China Root; F. Squine; G. Chinawurzel. Botanical Origin-Smilax China L. (S. ferox Wallich), a woody, thorny, climbing shrub, native of China and Japan, also of Eastern India, as Nepal, Khasia, Sikkim, and Assam, is commonly said to afford this drug. The chief authority for this statement is Kämpfer, who figured the plant in his Amanitates in 1712, and whose specimen is still preserved in the British Museum. S. glabra Roxb. and S. lanceafolia Roxb., natives of India and Southern China, have tubers which, according to Roxburgh, cannot be distinguished from the China root of medicine, though the plants are perfectly distinct in appearance from S. China. Dr. Hance,1 of Whampoa, received a living specimen of China root, which proved to be that of S. glabra. The three above-named species all grow in the island of Hongkong. History The use of this drug as a remedy for syphilis was made known to the Portuguese at Goa by Chinese traders about A.D. 1535. Garcia d'Orta, who makes this statement, further narrates that so great was the reputation of the new drug, that the small quantities first brought to Malacca were sold at the rate of 10 crowns per ganta, a weight of 24 ounces. The reported good effects of China root on the Emperor Charles V. who was suffering from gout, acquired for the drug a great celebrity in Europe, and several works were written in praise of its virtues. But though its powers were soon found to have been greatly over-rated, it still retained some reputation as a sudorific and alterative, and was much used at the end of the 17th century in the same way as sarsaparilla. It still retains a place in some modern pharmacopoeias. Description-The plant produces stout fibrous roots, here and there thickened into large tubers, which when dried become the drug China root. These tubers as found in the market, are of irregularly cylindrical form, usually a little flattened, sometimes producing short knobby branches. They are from about 4 to 6 or more inches in length, and 1 to 2 inches in thickness, covered with a rusty-coloured, rather shining bark, which in some specimens is smooth and in others more or less wrinkled. They have no distinct traces of rudimentary leaves, which however are perceptible on those of some allied species. Some still retain portions of the cord-like woody runners on which they grew; the bases of a few roots can also be observed. The tubers mostly show marks of having been trimmed with a knife. China root is inodorous and almost insipid. A transverse section exhibits the interior as a dense granular substance of a pale fawn colour. Microscopic Structure-The outermost cortical layer is made up of brown, thick-walled cells, tangentially extended. They enclose 1 Trimen's Journ. of Bot. i. (1872) 102. Indian ones from Khasia, Assam, and -S. glabra and S. lanceafolia have been Nepal. figured by Seemann in his Botany of the Herald, 1852-57, tabb. 99-100. S. China is well represented in the Kew Herbarium, where we have examined specimens from Nagasaki, Hakodadi, and Yokohama; from Loochoo, Corea, Formosa, Ningpo; and The earliest of which is by Andreas Vesalius, Epistola rationem, modumque propinandi radicis Chyme decocti, quo nuper invictissimus Carolus V. imperator usus est, Venet. 1546. numerous tufts of needle-shaped crystals of calcium oxalate, and reddish brown masses of resin. The bark is at once succeeded by the inner parenchyme which contrasts strongly with it, consisting of large, thinwalled, porous cells which are completely gorged with starch, but here and there contain colouring matter and bundles of crystals. The starch granules are large (up to 50 mkm.), spherical, often flattened and angular from mutual pressure. Like those of colchicum, they exhibit a radiate hilum: very frequently they have burst and run together, probably in consequence of the tubers having been scalded. The vascular bundles scattered through the parenchyme, contain usually two large scalariform or reticulated vessels, a string of delicate thin-walled parenchyme, and elegant wood-cells with distinct incrusting layers and linear pores. Chemical Composition-The drug is not known to contain any substance to which its supposed medicinal virtues can be referred. We have endeavoured to obtain from it Parillin, the crystalline principle of sarsaparilla, but without success. Commerce-China root is imported into Europe from the South of China-usually from Canton. The quantity shipped from that port in 1872, was only 384 peculs (51,200 b.); while the same year there was shipped from Hankow, the great trading city of the Yangtsze, no less than 10,258 peculs (1,367,733 fb.), all to Chinese ports.1 Uses-Notwithstanding the high opinion formerly entertained of the virtues of China root, it has in England fallen into complete disuse. In China and India, it is still held in great esteem for the relief of rheumatic and syphilitic complaints, and as an aphrodisiac and demulcent. Polak asserts that the tubers of Smilax are consumed as food by Turcomans and Mongols." Substitutes-Several American species of Smilax furnish a drug which at various times has been brought into commerce as Radix China occidentalis. Of the exact species it is difficult to speak with certainty: but S. Pseudo-China L. and S. tamnoides L., growing in the United States from New Jersey southward; S. Balbisiana Knth, a plant common in all the West Indian Islands; and S. Japicanga Griseb., S. syringoides Griseb. and S. Brasiliensis Spreng., are reputed to afford large tuberous rhizomes which in their several localities, replace the China root of Asia, and are employed in a similar manner. GRAMINEÆ. SACCHARUM. Sugar, Cane Sugar, Sucrose; F. Sucre, Sucre de canne; G. Zucker, Rohrzucker. Botanical Origin-Saccharum officinarum L., the Sugar Cane. The jointed stem is from 6 to 12 feet high, solid, hard, dense, internally 1 Returns of Trade at the Treaty Ports in China for 1872, pp. 34, 154. 2 We quote this statement with reserve, knowing that both Chinese and Europeans sometimes confound China root with the singular fungoid production termed Pachyma Cocos. The first is called in Chinese Tu fuh-ling, the second Fuh-ling or Pe-fuhling.-Pharm. Journ. iii. (1862) 421; F. Porter Smith, Mat. Med. and Nat. Hist. of China, 1871. 198; Dragendorff, Volksmedicin Turkestans in Buchner's Repertorium, xxii. (1873) 135. juicy, and hollow only in the flowering tops. Several varieties are cultivated, as the Country Cane, the original form of the species; the Ribbon Cane, with purple or yellow stripes along the stem; the Bourbon or Tahiti Cane, a more elongated, stronger, more hairy and very productive variety. Saccharum violaceum Tussac, the Batavian Cane, is also considered to be a variety; but the large S. Chinense Roxb. introduced from Canton in 1796 into the Botanic Gardens of Calcutta, may be a distinct species; it has a long, slender, erect panicle, while that of S. officinarum is hairy and spreading, with the ramifications alternate and more compound, not to mention other differences in the leaves and flowers. The sugar cane is cultivated from cuttings, the small seeds very seldom ripening. It succeeds in almost all tropical and subtropical countries, reaching in South America and Mexico an elevation above the sea of 5000-6000 feet. It is cultivated in most parts of India and China up to 30-31° N. lat., the mountainous regions excepted. From the elaborate investigations of Ritter, it appears that Saccharum officinarum was originally a native of Bengal, and of the IndoChinese countries, as well as of Borneo, Java, Bali, Celebes, and other islands of the Malay Archipelago. But there is no evidence that it is now found anywhere in a wild state. History The sugar cane was doubtless known in India from time immemorial, and grown for food as it still is at the present day, chiefly in those regions which are unsuited for the manufacture of sugar. 2 Herodotus, Theophrastus, Seneca, Strabo, and other early writers had some knowledge of raw sugar, which they speak of as the Honey of Canes or Honey made by human hands, not that of bees; but it was not until the commencement of the Christian era, that the ancients manifested an undoubted acquaintance with sugar, under the name of Saccharon. Thus Dioscorides 3 about A.D. 77, mentions the concreted honey called Σάκχαρον found upon canes (ἐπὶ τῶν καλάμων) in India and Arabia Felix, and which in substance and brittleness resembles salt. Pliny evidently knew the same thing under the name Saccharum; and the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, A.D. 54-68, states that honey from canes, called oáryapı, is exported from Barygaza, in the Gulf of Cambay, to the ports of the Red Sea, west of the Promontorium Aromatum, that is to say to the coast opposite Aden. Whether at that period sugar was produced in Western India, or was brought thither from the Ganges, is a point still doubtful. Bengal is probably the country of the earliest manufacture of sugar; hence its names in all the languages of Western-Asiatic and European nations are derived from the Sanskrit Sharkará, signifying a substance in the shape of small grains or stones. It is strange that this word contains no allusion to the taste of the substance. Candy, as sugar in large crystals is called, is derived from the Arabic Kand or Kandat, a name of the same signification. An old Sanskrit 1 Erdkunde von Asien, ix. West-Asien, Berlin, 1840. pp. 230-291. 2 The production which the English translators of the Bible have rendered Sweet Cane, and which is alluded to by the prophets Isaiah (ch. xliii. 24) and Jeremiah (ch. vi. 20) as a commodity imported from a distant country, has been the subject of name of Central Bengal is Gura, whence is derived the word Gula, meaning raw sugar, a term for sugar universally employed in the Malayan Archipelago, where on the other hand they have their own names for the sugar cane, although not for sugar. This fact again speaks in favour of Ritter's opinion, that the preparation of sugar in a dry crystalline state is due to the inhabitants of Bengal. Sugar under the name of Shi-mi, i.e. Stone-honey, is frequently mentioned in the ancient Chinese annals among the productions of India and Persia; and it is recorded that the Emperor Tai-tsung, A.D. 627-650, sent an envoy to the kingdom of Magadha in India, the modern Bahar, to learn the method of manufacturing sugar. The Chinese, in fact, acknowledge that the Indians between A.D. 766 and 780 were their first teachers in the art of refining sugar, for which they had no particular ancient written character. 3 An Arabian writer, Abu Zayd al Hasan,2 informs us that about A.D. 850, the sugar cane was growing on the north-eastern shore of the Persian Gulf; and in the following century, the traveller Ali Istakhri found sugar abundantly produced in the Persian province of Kuzistan, the ancient Susiana. About the same time (A.D. 950), Moses of Chorene, an Armenian, also stated that the manufacture of sugar was flourishing near the celebrated school of medicine at Jondisabur in the same province, and remains of this industry in the shape of millstones, &c. still exist near Ahwas. Persian physicians of the 10th and 11th centuries, as Rhazes, Haly Abbas, and Avicenna, introduced sugar into medicine. The Arabs cultivated the sugar cane in many of their Mediterranean settlements, as Cyprus, Sicily, Italy, Northern Africa and Spain. The Calendar of Cordova shows that as early as A.D. 961, the cultivation was well understood in Spain, which is now the only country in Europe where sugar mills still exist.5 William II., King of Sicily, presented in A.D. 1176 to the convent of Monreale, mills for grinding cane, the culture of which still lingers at Avola near Syracuse, though only for the sake of making rum. In 1767, the sugar plantations and sugar houses at this spot were described by a traveller as "worth seeing. During the middle ages, England in common with the rest of Northern Europe, was supplied with sugar from the Mediterranean countries, especially Egypt and Cyprus. It was imported from Alexandria as early as the end of the 10th century by the Venetians, with whom it long remained an important article of trade. Thus we find that in A.D. 1319, a merchant of Venice, Tommaso Loredano, shipped to London 100,000 lb. of sugar, the proceeds of which were to be returned in wool, which at that period constituted the great wealth of England. Sugar was then very dear: thus from 1259 to 1350, the average price in England was about 1s. per b., and from 1351 to 1400, 1s. 7d. In France during the same period, it must have been largely obtainable, though doubtless expensive. King John II. ordered in 1353, that the apothe 1 Bretschneider, Chinese Botanical Works, 1870. 46. 2 Ritter, 1.c. 286. 3 Buch der Länder, translated by Mordtmann, Hamburg, 1845. 57. 4 Le Calendrier de Cordoue de l'année 961, par R. Dozy, Leyde, 1873. 25. 41. 91. 5 There are several in the neighbourhood of Malaga. 6 Riedesel, Travels through Sicily, Lond. 1773. 67. 7 Marin, Commercio de' Veneziani, v. 306. 8 Rogers, Hist. of Agriculture and Prices in England, i. (1866) 633. 641. caries of Paris should not use honey in making those confections which ought to be prepared with the good white sugar called cafetin.1 The importance of the sugar manufacture in the East was witnessed in the latter half of the 13th century by Marco Polo; and in 1510 by Barbosa and other European travellers; and the trading nations of Europe rapidly spread the cultivation of the cane over all the countries, of which the climate was suitable. Thus, its introduction into Madeira goes back as far as A.D. 1420; it reached St. Domingo in 1494, the Canary Islands in 1503, Brazil in the beginning of the 16th century, Mexico about 1520, Guiana about 1600, Guadaloupe in 1644, Martinique in 1650, Mauritius towards 1750, Natal5 and New South Wales about 1852, while from a very early period, the sugar cane had been propagated from the Indian Archipelago over all the islands of the Pacific Ocean. 6 The ancient cultivation in Egypt, probably never quite extinct, has been revived on an extensive scale by the present viceroy, Ismail Pasha. There were 13 sugar factories, making raw sugar, belonging to the Egyptian government at work in 1872, and about 100,000 acres of land devoted to sugar cane. The export of sugar from Egypt in 1872, reached 2 millions of kantars or about 89,200 tons.7 8 The imperfection of organic chemistry previous to the middle of the 18th century, permitted no exact investigations into the chemical nature of sugar. Marggraf of Berlin proved in 1747, that sugar occurs in many vegetables, and succeeded in obtaining it in a pure crystallized state from the juice of beet-root. The enormous practical importance of this discovery did not escape him, and he caused serious attempts to be made for rendering it available, which were so far successful that the first manufactory of beet-sugar was established in 1796 by Achard at Kunern in Silesia. 9 This new branch of industry was greatly promoted by the prohibitive measures, whereby Napoleon excluded colonial sugar from almost the whole Continent; and it is now carried forward upon such a scale that 640,000 to 680,000 tons of beetroot sugar are annually produced in Europe, the entire production of cane sugar being estimated at 1,260,000 to 1,413,000 tons.10 Among the British colonies, Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Barbados, and Jamaica produce at present the largest quantity of sugar. Production-No crystals are found in the parenchyme of the cane, the sugar existing as an aqueous solution, chiefly within the cells of the centre of the stem. The transverse section of the cane exhibits numerous fibro-vascular bundles, scattered through the tissue, as in other monocotyledonous stems; yet these bundles are most abundant towards the 1 Ordonnances des rois de France, ii. (1729) 535. 2 Yule, Book of Ser Marco Polo, ii. (1871) 79. 171. 180. &c. 3 Letters of Christ. Columbus (Hakluyt Society) 1870. 81-84. De Candolle, Géogr. botanique, 836. 5 The value of the sugar exported from Natal in 1871 reached the astonishing amount of £180,496. 6 Yet owing to the gold discoveries, the propagation of the cane in Australia was little thought of until about 1866 or 1867, when small lots of sugar were made. 7 Consul Rogers, Report on the Trade of Cairo for 1872, presented to Parliament. 8 Expériences chymiques faites dans le dessein de tirer un véritable sucre de diverses plantes qui croissent dans nos contrées, par Mr. Marggraf, traduit du latin-Hist. de l'Académie royale des Sciences et belles lettres, année 1747 (Berlin 1749) 79–90. 9 And also that of milk sugar, which was then much used on the Continent to adulterate cane sugar. 10 Produce Markets Review, March 28, 1868. |