“In 1851, when I was at the falls of the Rio Negro, which are crossed by the equator, nine men started from the village of St. Gabriel to gather Salsa, as they called it, at the head of the river Cauaburís. During their absence I made the acquaintance of an old Indian, who told me that four years ago he had brought stools of Salsa from the Cauaburís and had planted them in a tabocál,—a clump of bamboos, indicating the site of an ancient Indian village,—on the other side of the falls, whither he invited me to go and witness the gathering of his first crop of roots. On the 23rd March, I visited the tabocál, and found some half-dozen plants of a Smilax with very prickly stems, but no flowers or fruit. At my request the Indian operated on the finest plant first. It had five stems from the crown, and numerous roots about 9 feet long, radiating horizontally on all sides. The thin covering of earth was first scraped away from the roots by hand, aided by a pointed stick; and had the salsa been the only plant occupying the ground, the task would have been easy. But the roots of the salsa were often difficult to trace among those of bamboo and other plants, which had to be cut through with a knife whenever they came in the way. The roots being at length all laid bare—(in this case it was the work of half a day, but with large plants it sometimes takes up a whole day or even more)—they were cut off near the crown, a few slender ones being allowed to remain, to aid the plant in renewing its growth. The stems also were shortened down to near the ground, and a little earth and dead leaves heaped over the crown, which would soon shoot out new stems.
“The yield of this plant, of four years’ growth, was 16 lb.—half a Portuguese arroba—of roots; but a well grown plant will afford at the first cutting from one to two arrobas. In a couple of years, a plant may be cut again, but the yield will be much smaller and the roots more slender and less starchy.”
General Description—The medicinal species of Smilax have a thick, short, knotty rhizome, called by the druggists chump, from which grow in a horizontal direction long fleshy roots, from about the thickness of a quill to that of the little finger. These roots are mostly simple, forked only towards their extremities, beset with thread-like branching rootlets of nearly uniform size, which however are not emitted to any great extent from the more slender part of the root near the stock. When fresh the root is plump,[2640] but as found in commerce in the dried state it is more or less furrowed longitudinally, at least in the vicinity of the rhizome. When examined with a good lens both roots and rootlets may be seen in some specimens to be clothed with short velvety or shaggy hairs.
The presence or absence in greater or less abundance of starch in the bark of the root is regarded as an important criterion in estimating the good quality of sarsaparilla. In England the non-amylaceous or non-mealy roots are preferred, they alone being suitable for the manufacture of the dark fluid extract that is valued by the public. On the Continent, and especially in Italy, sarsaparilla, which when cut exhibits a thick bark, pure white within, is the esteemed kind.
The more or less plentiful occurrence of starch in the roots of Smilax is a character which has no botanical significance, and appears, indeed, to vary in the same species. If one examines Jamaica sarsaparilla by shaving off a little of the bark, one finds a large majority of roots to be non-amylaceous in their entire length; but others can be picked out which, though non-amylaceous for some distance from the rhizome, acquire a starchy bark, which is white internally in their middle and lower portions;—and there are still others which are slightly starchy even as they start from the parent rhizome, becoming still more as they advance. In Guatemala sarsaparilla, which is considered a very mealy sort, it is easy to perceive that the bark is hardly amylaceous in the vicinity of the rhizome, but that it acquires an enormous deposit of fecula as it proceeds in its growth.
Sarsaparilla varies greatly in the abundance of rootlets, technically called beard, with which the roots are clothed. This character depends partly on natural circumstances, and partly on the practice of the collectors who remove or retain the rootlets at will. Dr. Rhys of Belize has stated that the proportion of rootlets depends much on the nature of the soil, their development being most favoured by moist situations.
Dry sarsaparilla has not much smell, yet when large quantities are boiled, or when a decoction is evaporated, a peculiar and very perceptible odour is emitted. The taste of the root is earthy, and not well marked, and even a decoction has no very distinctive flavour.
Microscopic Structure[2641]—On a transverse section of the root, its fibro-vascular bundles are seen to be restricted to the central part, being all enclosed by a brown ring. Within this ring the bundles are densely packed so as to form a ligneous zone. The very centre of the section consists of white medullary tissue, through which sometimes a certain number of fibro-vascular bundles are scattered. A similar medullary parenchyme is met with between the brown ring or nucleus-sheath or the epidermis. On a longitudinal section the latter exhibits several rows of elongated cells, having their outer brown walls thickened by secondary deposits. The brown nucleus-sheath, on the other hand, consists of only one row of prismatic cells, their inner and lateral walls alone having secondary deposits. The vascular bundles contain large scalariform vessels and lignified prosenchymatous cells.
The parenchymatous cells, if not devoid of solid contents, are loaded with large compound starch granules; some cells also exhibit bundles of acicular crystals of calcium oxalate. In non-mealy sarsaparilla the vessels and ligneous cells sometimes contain a yellow resin.
The various sorts of sarsaparilla differ, not only in being mealy or non-mealy, but also as regards the thickness of the ligneous zone, which in some of them is many times thinner than the diameter of the central medullary tissue. In other kinds this diameter is very much smaller. Yet the nucleus-sheath affords still better means for distinguishing the sorts of this drug, if we examine its single cells in a transverse section. The outline of such a cell may be of a square or somewhat rounded shape, or it may be more or less extended. In this case it may be extended in the direction of a radius, or in the direction of a tangent. The secondary deposits may vary in thickness.