A writer from Singapore states, “I lately saw a Chinaman brought to the police for fabricating opium balls. The imitation balls were composed of a skin or husk formed from the leaves of Madras tobacco, inside was sand, which was evidently intended to form the shape of the balls till the outer covering had sufficiently set, the whole was neatly sewed with bandages of calico, which would be removed when the tobacco was able to retain its proper shape, the sand would then be abstracted, and a mixture of gambier and opium substituted, while the outside would be rubbed over with a watery solution of chandu. By these means the native traders are much and often imposed upon.”
[CHAPTER XV.]
NEPENTHES.
“Bright Helen mixed a mirth-inspiring bowl,
Tempered with drugs of sovereign use, to assuage
The boiling bosom of tumultuous rage;
To clear the cloudy front of wrinkled care,
And dry the tearful sluices of despair.”
Pope’s Homer.
The influence of climate in modifying the characters of plants is a circumstance known to all botanical students. The same plant, in temperate regions and under the tropics, exhibits different properties, or, we should rather say, in one instance developes more highly certain properties which in the other lie nearly dormant. The newly-introduced sorghum, from which we have been promised an unfailing supply of excellent sugar, fails in the North of France to reach that degree of maturity, or to develope in such manner its saccharine secretions as to be available for the manufacture of a crystallizable sugar. The sweet floating grass (Glyceria fluitans) in Poland and Russia supplies farinaceous seeds, which, under the name of manna croup, are consumed as food; but no seeds at all available for that purpose are produced at home from the same plant, although it grows freely. The flavour of the onion, as grown in Egypt, is, we are assured, far milder, and vastly different from the bulbs cultivated in Britain. The odour of violets and other flowers grown for perfumery and other purposes at Nice, have a scent more rich and delicious than when grown in English soil, subject to our variable climate. But the most extraordinary effect of all, produced by these influences upon plants, occurs in the case of hemp, which in Europe developes its fibrous qualities to such an extent as to produce a material for cordage hitherto unsurpassed; but in India, while deficient in this respect, developes narcotic secretions to such an extent as to occupy a prominent position among the chief narcotics of the world.