Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin, Met with in Great Britain and British India

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Macmillan, 1874 - 704 pages

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Page 176 - The balsam tree has an average height of 70 feet with a straight trunk, generally rising to a height of 40 feet before it branches. The balsam is collected by cutting in the bark two deep sloping notches, meeting at their lower ends in a sharp angle. Below this V-shaped cut, the bark and wood is a little hollowed out, and a calabash of the size and shape of a deep tea-cup is fixed. This arrangement is repeated, so that as many as twenty calabashes may be seen on various parts of the same trunk. When...
Page 327 - Copy of further Correspondence relating to the introduction of the Chinchona Plant into India, and to proceedings connected with its cultivation, from April 1863 to April 1866.
Page 16 - ... of an inch in diameter, emitting rootlets still smaller. The rhizome is of somewhat flattened cylindrical form, distinctly marked at intervals with the scars of fallen leaves. A transverse section exhibits in the centre a horny whitish pith, round which are a number of rather coarse, irregular woody rays, and outside them a hard, thickish bark. The larger roots when broken display a thick cortical layer, the space within which contains converging wedges of open woody tissue 3 to 5 in number forming...
Page 156 - This substance, after being washed with diluted alcohol, and dried, appears as an amorphous, yellow powder, having a strong, bitter-sweet taste, and an acid reaction. Upon incineration, ammoniated glycyirhizin should not leave more than a trace of ash
Page 197 - ... of rather duller polish than the surrounding portion which is somewhat radially striated. The seed is exalbuminous, with thick hard cotyledons, a short straight included radicle, and a plumule in which the pinnation of the leaves is easily perceptible.
Page 126 - ... iron.* It is but partially soluble in alkalis or in bisulphide of carbon. Bruckner (1867) found this portion to yield 75'6 per cent, of carbon and 9'5 of hydrogen. The resin which the bisulphide refuses to dissolve is freely soluble in ether. It contains only 57'4 per cent, of carbon. The resin of Myrrh to which when moistened with alcohol a small quantity of hydrochloric acid is added, assumes a violet hue, but far less brilliant than that displayed by resin of Galbanum when treated in a similar...
Page 151 - Examined microscopically, this gummy substance is seen to consist not of dried mucilage, but of the very cells of the pith and medullary rays, in process of transformation into tragacanth. The transformed cells, if their transformation has not advanced too far, exhibit the angular form and close packing of parenchyme-cells, but their walls are much incrassated and evidently consist of numerous very thin strata.
Page 235 - If cautiously melted by the warmth of the sun, the stearoptene forms on cooling microscopic crystals of very peculiar shape. Most of them have the form of truncated hexahedral pyramids, not however belonging to the rhombohedric system, as the angles are evidently not equal ; many of them are oddly curved, thus §. Examined under the polarizing microscope, these crystals from their refractive power make a brilliant object.
Page 502 - C2eH4402 22 Mucilage ... ... 18 Malates, chiefly of calcium and sodium .-.-. 12 Mineral compounds ... .-.. ... ... 10 100 The amorphous resin is readily soluble in cold spirit of wine containing about 70 per cent, of alcohol. The solution has no acid reaction but an extremely burning acrid taste : in fact it is to the amorphous indifferent resin that euphorbium owes its intense acridity.
Page 151 - On cutting off a branch of the thickness of the finger, there immediately exudes from the centre, a stream of soft, solid tragacanth, pushing itself out like a worm, to the length of f of an inch, sometimes in the course of half an hour ; while much smaller streams (or none at all) are emitted from the medullary rays of the thick bark.

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