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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The valuable species of Chinchona-trees?thoir history, their discoverers, and their forests. I.?THE LOXA REGION, AND ITS CROWN BARKS. The region around Loxa, on the southern frontier of the modern republic of Ecuador, is the original home of the Chinchona, and nearly in the centre of its latitudinal range of growth. On the lofty grass-covered slopes of the Andes, around the little town of Loxa, and in the sheltered ravines and dense forests, those precious trees were found which first made known to the world the healing virtues of Peruvian bark. They were most plentifully met with in the forests of Uritusinga, Rumisitana, Cajanuma, Boqueron, Villonaco, and Monje, all within short distances of Loxa. Linnaeus had named these trees Chinchona officinalis; but when Humboldt and Bonpland examined them, the discovery of other species yielding medicinal bark had rendered the name inappropriate, and they very properly re-christened them, after the distinguished Frenchman who had originally described them, Chinchona Condaminea. Humboldt says that they grow on mica slate and gneiss, from 6000 to 8000 feet above the sea, with a mean temperature between 60 and 65 Fahr. In his time the tree was cut down in its first flowering season, or in the fourth or seventh of its age, according as it had sprung from a vigorous root-shoot, or from a seed. He describes the luxuriance of the vegetation to be such that the younger trees, only six inches in diameter, often attain from fifty-three to sixty-four English feet in height. Thisbeautiful tree, he continues, which is adorned with leaves above five inches long and two broad, growing in dense forests, seems always to aspire to rise above its neighbours. As its upper branches wave to and fro in the wind, their red and shinin...