In the Slave States of America Mr. Buckle might have seen the economical results of a society based upon selfishness instead of justice. The negro shows elsewhere, as we have seen, his capacity to take his part in the free division of labor, and the consequent multiplication of the productions of the different arts, which occasions, in the words of Adam Smith, in a well-governed society that universal opulence which extends itself to the negroes, is contained in a letter to the writer of this paper from one of the principal English residents in Victoria, the capital of Vancouver's Island. It formed part of a general description of the Colony, furnished without any reference to the question of Slavery:-"Before the gold excitement, but during the same year, (1858,) the Legislature of California passed a law forbidding the immigration of negroes. This caused the latter to appoint a deputation, which visited the British Possession of Vancouver's Island; and so favorable was their report, that it not only caused many colored people to leave California, but also aroused general attention, particularly that of British subjects; for by all who had occasionally heard of the Island before, it was considered a sort of petty Siberia. While people were reading accounts of the climate, soil, and low price of town lots in Victoria, there came rumors of rich gold sands on the banks of the Frazer River in British Columbia. Two or three small coasting vessels had previously sailed with colored passengers; but the demand for passages by white people became so great, that large steamships departed every few days with from three hundred to one thousand. Among them were some colored peo: ple, and they have increased in number until, I think, we may safely estimate them at five hundred. The occupations of these colored people in Victoria are, to the best of my recollection, porters, sawyers, draymen, day-laborers, barbers, and bath-keepers; eating-house keepers; one hosier, as black as a coal, with the best stock in the town; and two or three grocers. Some of them went to the mines, and were moderately successful. Their favorite investment is in a plot of ground, on which they build a neat little cottage and cultivate vegetables, raise poultry, etc. Nearly all had been prosperous, and a few had so judiciously invested that they were in receipt of from ten pounds to forty pounds a month from rent. They are industrious, economical, and intend to make the colony their permanent home; the outskirts of the town are well sprinkled with their humble but neat dwellings, and their land is yearly increasing in value. By this showing they are a quiet, industrious, and law-abiding people; but there is a drawback, taking them altogether as citizens, which arises from their earnest desire to be on a perfect social equality with the whites at church, the theater, concerts, and other public places of assembly. When you consider the strong disinclination for their company, not only of our large American population, but also of Englishmen, who very quickly imbibe the American prejudice, you can readily conceive that a number of disagreeable scenes occur." the lowest ranks of the people. In the squalid and comfortless homes even of the higher ranks of the people in the American Slave States, we see the consequence of oppressed and degraded industry. "It may be," says Adam Smith again, "that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages." The American slaveowner is, as it were, a petty African king, and in real penury, as well as in power, resembles such a ruler. It is said, indeed, that we owed to slavery the produce which supplied the principal manufacture of Great Britain. But the whole of this production was in truth to be credited to free industry, while all the waste and ruin which accompanied it must be ascribed to slavery. The possibility of the profitable growth of so much cotton was caused by the commerce and invention of liberty, while the barbarism of the poor whites, the brutifying of the negro population, and the exhaustion of the American soil, are the net results of slavery. In truth, to Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton, and Whitney-free citizens of England and the Northern States-the Southern planters owed the whole value of their cotton. What slavery may really claim as its own work is that, by exhausting the soil it occupies by a barbarous agriculture, which sets the laws of chemistry as well as of political economy at defiance, it hastens its own extinction from the day that its area is once definitely and narrowly circumscribed. This, its own advocates admit, but with a singular inference: "Slavery has, by giving to the laws of nature free scope, moved over a thousand miles of territory, leaving not a slave behind. Why should good men attempt to check it in its progress? If the laws of nature pass slavery farther and further south, why not let it go, even though, in process of time it should, by the operation of natural laws, pass away altogether from the territory where it now exists ?"* Why, we may ask, should devastation be suffered to spread? Should fires be suffered to burn themselves out by advancing from street to street until not a house remains to check the conflagration? The slave *The South Vindicated. holder, as he moves southward or west- | is a brand upon us, which I think it im- Once it was the prayer of every planter that slavery might soon cease to degrade his habitation. Now the Governor of a Southern State boldly declares in a message to its Legislature, without perception of the real force of his own argument, that "irrespective of interest, the Act of Congress declaring the slave-trade piracy, *Mr. Hopkins, in his introduction to The South Vindicated, puts the total free population of the Southern States at six millions three hundred thousand. The number of free "families" he puts at one million one hundred and fourteen thousand six hundred and eighty-seven, of which three hundred and forty-five thousand two hundred and thirty-nine own slaves. He then asks what be comes of the five million whites referred to by Mr. Cairnes as "too poor to own slaves"? Mr. Hopkins, however, has taken his figures from the census of 1850, the census of 1860, he says, not being completed or published. By a reference, however, to the statistics given in Mr. Ellison's excellent work on Slavery and Secession, 2d Ed. P. 363, it will be seen that the total free population of the States enumerated as Slave States by Mr. Hopkins was, in 1860, considerably above eight millions. Taking the same proportion of nonslaveowning to slaveowning families, it would follow that more than five millions of the population belong to the former. *Slavery and Secession, by T. Ellison, 2d Ed., } From the London Intellectual Observer. PERUVIAN-BARK TREES AND THEIR TRANSPLANTATION. BY BERTHOLD SEEMANN, F.L S., F.R.G.S.* MANY years before the Irish famine, William Cobbett predicted that calamity, and many years before the present cotton distress, far-seeing minds foretold that catastrophe. Nothing could be more sound than the principles upon which these unheeded warnings were based the uncertainty always attendant on a single source of supply. Cobbett knew that potatoes, like all other organisms, are subject to occasional attacks of diseases and wide-spread epidemics; and that a whole people, like the Irish, relying for their staple food upon these roots, must sooner or later share the fate of the product upon which they have placed their main dependence, and with the fortunes of which they have intimately associated themselves. It was the same with cotton. Far-seeing men could perceive the political thunderstorm gathering in the United States; and knowing that all Lancashire, all England-in fact, all the world-relied upon this one source of supply for cotton, they denounced the recklessness of such improvidence in the strongest terms, formed associations for obtaining the raw material from other countries than the United States, and in speech and print did all in their power to arouse public attention. Yet as long as the mills were busy, and millions of bales were coming in without interruption, no notice was taken of their endeavors to stave off the fearful doom to which our manufacturing population was drifting. Now that the calamity has at length overtaken us, and thousands upon thousands of pounds are spent in keeping the workpeople from actual starvation, every body remembers hearing Cassandra's voice. If but a hundredth part of what is now required to feed the hungry spinners had been devoted to encouraging the growth of cotton in the various tropical and subtropical possessions of Great Britain, Lancashire distress would never have been heard of, and manufac turers would have gradually relied upon the produce of free labor instead of pay ing a premium to slavery. Mankind is threatened by a third danger, which may prove equally great, equally fatal in its consequences. Most men are probably not aware of the vast benefits they owe to the discovery of the Peruvian bark, the produce of various species of Chinchona, and the alkaloids, quinine and chichonine, embedded in it. History takes no notice of the death of countless mediocrities from fever and ague, but fails not to record that Alexander the Great died of the common remittent fever at Babylon, and that Oliver Cromwell was carried off by ague. A few doses of quinine might have saved their lives, and compelled Clio to make very different entries in her diary than she has done. The whole Walcheren expedition was saved from destruction by a Yankee skipper arriving just in the nick of time with a supply of this medicine. In order to hold many important tropical possessessions it is not only necessary for our race to keep the powder dry, but also take care not to let the quinine run too low. In fact the drug is almost as indis pensable to mankind as air itself, and aided by this silent agent Europeans have been able to establish happy homes, busy factories, and flourishing colonies in districts which, without this invaluable aid, would have simply become their graveyards. Our only wonder is how we could ever have done without it, and what would become of us if the supply should ever fail. And the supply does begin to fail, fail rapidly. It is known that one million two hundred thousand pounds of Peruvian bark (meaning by that term all medicinal barks produced by Chinchona trees) are annually imported into England; and it is estimated that no less than three million pounds, and are supposed by some to have been formerly ignorant of the great therapeutic qualities of these drugs. They called the Loxa bark" Quinaquina" (bark of barks,) and Markham has well shown that in the Quichua language, to which the term belongs, a doubling of a name is an indication that the plant to which it applies possesses, in the estimation of the Indians, some medicinal virtue. Now, we know of no other use of the Loxa bark except that derived from its febrifuge properties, and in my mind there is little doubt that it was to this the doubling of the name must be attributed. Those who have had practical experience in gathering information about medicinal plants from the lips of barbarous people, as I have had, will not be surprised at the secrecy with which the knowledge of the use of Quinaquina was preserved. As a rule, the most sovereign remedies are never revealed to a stranger, nor known to the people at large, and no bribe will induce the "medical profession" amongst the Indians to be otherwise than reserved when questioned by Europeans. Madame de Genlis, in her Zuma, builds the plot of her charming little story on a conspira cy of the Indians, the object of which was to allow the climate to destroy their Spanish enemy by withholding the knowledge of the bark when fever attacked them. I am aware that this is not history, but I have always thought, considering the Indian character, and the strong desire of the aboriginal population to get rid of their foreign oppressors, that Madame de Genlis had here hit upon the true solution of the question why so many years elapsed before Europeans became acquainted with this bark of barks. probably a much greater quantity, are | intimately acquainted with the names and consumed every year throughout the commercial value of the different sorts, world. The demand is daily increasing, and the drain upon the South-American forests, including those of New-Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, has now been going on for more than two centu. ries, though not to such an extent as at present. The better kinds, those yielding the largest quantity of alkaloids, are very local in their geographical range at present, often limited to very circumscribed districts; and though we speak of Chinchona forests, it is absolute delusion to fancy that these trees, like our own pines and oaks, form entire woods by themselves. On the contrary, they are intermingled with other trees, and generally occur in isolated specimens. The bark is collected by ignorant Indians, who, improvident of the future, strip the tree anyhow, and in most instances without properly felling it, so that it begins to rot after being robbed of its produce, and has no power to put forth new shoots from the root. Thus, what with the excessive and unceasing demand for bark, and the reckless manner of collecting it, large tracts of country, formerly famous for their abundant yield, are now entirely denuded of almost every trace of Chinchona vegetation. The neighborhood of Loxa in Ecuador was at no very remote period one of the principal localities for several of our best barks, but when, in 1847, Captain Pim and I visited the place, we had to go a considerable distance from the town before we obtained even the sight of a single specimen. Stimulated by the present high prices the bark collectors have penetrated the remotest districts, explored wilds probably never trodden by the foot of the white man; and if by any chance they are lost, or their provisions fall short, death is their inevitable doom. Dr. Weddell describes a poor fellow who thus had ended his days, far away from home and friends. His corpse was nearly naked, and covered with myriads of insects, the stings of which had tormented his last moments. Close by was a hastily-constructed hut, his clothes, his knife, and an earthen pot, showing the remnants of the last meal of a man in search of medicine which was to save the life of others. The Indians, though at present the best cascarilleros, or bark-collectors, and It is not until the year 1630, that Don Juan Lopez de Canizares, the Spanish Corregidor of Loxa, being ill of intermittent fever, an Indian is said to have revealed to him the virtues of the bark, and instructed him in the proper way of administering it. About eight years later the wife of the fourth Count of Chinchon, Viceroy of Peru, was suffering from the same complaint, when the Loxa Corregidor forwarded a parcel of powdered quinaquina as a sovereign and never-failing remedy for "tertiana." It effected a complete cure, and the particular plant which had this honor, and yields the true and original Peruvian bark is, as Howard | heat or cold, and, confounding cause and justly concludes, the Chahuarguera varie- effect, they pronounce all fevers to proty of Chinchona Condaminea, a kind con- ceed from heat. Bark they justly believe taining a large percentage of Chinchoni- to be very heating, and hence their prejudine (the importance of which is just be- dice against its application in fever-a ginning to be recognized.) It is there- prejudice which seems to have communifore not to quinine, but to Chinchonodine cated itself even to the Indians. that the Countess's cure was due. That lady on returning to Spain in 1640, took with her a quantity of the healing bark, and was thus the first to introduce this invaluable medicine into Europe. Hence it was sometimes called Countess's bark, or Countess's powder; and hence, to commemorate the event, Linnæus named the genius of plants producing these barks, Chinchona. By some accident, not isolated in his nomenclature, he mis-getable alkaloid analogous to morphine spelt the name, writing Cinchona, and until a recent period no attempt was made to correct it. The Jesuits in their wanderings through South America became well acquainted with the bark, and in 1680 sent parcels of it to Rome, whence it was distributed by Cardinal de Lugo amongst the members of their society throughout Europe, and obtained the name of Jesuit's bark, or Cardinal's bark. It was in consequence of this patronage that bigoted Protestants refused to avail themselves of a medicine favored by the Roman Catholics, just as staunch Catholics objected to the use of beer, an infusion of barley flavored with hop, instead of sweet gale, and other herbs, as in the case of ale, because as an old song has it, "with this same beer came in heresy here." At the time of Cromwell's death from ague, the use of Peruvian bark was actually known in London. In 1678 Louis XIV. bought the secret of preparing quinaquina from Sir Robert Talbot, an English physician, for two thousand louis d'ors, a title, and a large pension, and from that time downward, the use of this medicine, though often and violently opposed by practitioners, gradually made its way into every country and all circles of society. The only people who now entertain any prejudice against its administration are the natives of those very countries from which we obtain our supplies. The medical men of Guayaquil, for instance, must call it by some other name in their prescriptions, or else patients object to taking it. The Spanish people throughout America have a deeply-rooted theory that all diseases are referable to the influence of either Until the present century Peruvian bark was administered in its crude state; and it was not until 1816 that a Portuguese surgeon, Dr. Gomez, succeeded in isolating the febrifugal principle, hinted at by Dr. Duncan at Edinburgh, and named by the former Chinchonine. But the final discovery of quinine is due to two French chemists, Pelletier and Caventou, in 1820, who considered it a ve and strychnine, and they afterward found that the febrifugal principle was seated in two alkaloids, quinine and chinchonine, separate or together. In 1829 Pelletier discovered a third alkaloid, aricine, derived from Chinchona pubescens, and at present of no known medicinal value. Quinine is a white substance, without smell, bitter, fusible, crystalized, with the property of left-handed rotatory polarization. The salts of quinine are soluble in water, alcohol, and ether. Chinchonidine differs from quinine in being less soluble in water, altogether insoluble in ether, and having the property of right-handed rotatory polarization, agreeing in the latter respect with quinine, a substance which forms salts like those of quinine, and becomes green by successive additions of chlorine and ammonia. In this changing of color it differs essentially from chinchonidine, which has not the property of turning green, and forms a sulphate almost exactly like that of quinine. In many distant parts quinine is equal in value to gold, and there is hardly a chemist of eminence who has not tried his hand at producing these alkaloids artificially. We have of late years obtained so many wonderful results in the laboratory, that we should not treat their endeavors as aiming at any thing beyond their reach. There is just a possibility that one day the dreams of alchemists may be realized by the baser metals being converted into gold, and the artificial production of quinine ranks in the same category. But these alkaloids are such complex atoms, that there is very little probability of their ever being obtained from any sources save Nature's own workshop. Such being the |