The shadow of a pale Spanish lady, dead for almost three centuries, has returned to the dense rain forests of the western slopes of the Andes.
The shadow is that of the Countess of Chinchon, wife of the redoubtable Don Luiz Geronimo de Cabrera Bobadilla y Mendoza, colonial viceroy of Peru. She was dying of a strange disease in Lima in 1638. Her Jesuit confessor, the story goes, gave a medicine to her doctor made from the bark of a common Peruvian tree. It supposedly saved her life and two years later she returned to Spain, carrying with her some of the magic bark. Thus she gave to the world one of the supreme medicines of all times. A century later the Swedish botanist Linnaeus tried to pay a compliment to the long-dead beauty but misspelled her name—calling her tree “cinchona”. Out of it came quinine.
The Andean forests remained for 200 years the only source of the magic drug—quinine. The cinchona trees grew wild. They were stripped of bark recklessly and became very scarce. By 1850 the price of quinine was $50 an ounce and only the rich could afford to have malaria.
The British tried to transplant the tree in India and failed. Then Dutch botanists obtained some seed, planted it in the East Indies, and developed high-yielding species. Soon this region became the sole source of the world’s supply. The price dropped to 18 cents an ounce and the lands over which the long-dead Countess had ruled dropped out of the picture.
Now South American countries, notably Venezuela and Bolivia, are reclaiming the crop with improved varieties of the cinchona tree, equal to the best produced by the Dutch. They are regaining rapidly the dead lady’s gift.
Colombia’s Ant Tree
In the sparsely inhabited, tropical portion of eastern Colombia is an ant tree known as the barrasanta. It is a small, slender tree with showy, red flowers which grows 25 to 30 feet in height. Both trunk and branches are hollow and filled with masses of vicious, biting ants. As soon as the tree is disturbed the insects swarm upon the invader. As a result the tree is generally left alone both by Indians and white settlers. The ants are protected by the branches and in turn protect the host with their fighting prowess.
A curious shrub which grows out of enormous anthills found through the llanos region of western Colombia furnishes quite a different example of insect-plant association. The ants are “leaf cutters.” All other plant life avoids their immediate neighborhood. This particular shrub exudes a viscous, milky juice which traps any ants which try to climb toward its leaves. Hence the insects have learned to leave it alone and it enjoys the rich ant hill soil without competition from any other plants.
The Strange Behavior of Plants
The behavior characteristics of some American plants are strange indeed.