CANADIAN

PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL

VOL. XIV, No. 1. TORONTO, AUGUST, 1880. WHOLE No. CXLIII

Original and Selected Papers.

A MONTH IN JAMAICA.

BY H. J. Rose.

Who has not looked forward with delight to a possible trip to the tropics? No one, certainly, who finds books in the running brooks, or sermons in "weeds." The fiat of an M.D. made an actual fact out of the dimmest improbability, and the writer's experience of this beautiful island, gained during a short sojourn, may not be uninteresting to readers of the JOURNAL.

A mountainous island in the tropics, with its almost limitless variety of vegetation, probably produces three-fourths of the plants most interesting to a druggist, and any one with a stock of time and money might find such plants in Jamaica, the expenditure of both being rendered necessary by the absence of public conveyances, except a short railway nd stage route on the south side of the island. This lack of one of the first requirements of civilization may, in the case of Jamaica, be explained by the fact that the planters, merchants and agents, have plenty of horses at their disposal, while the remaining five hundred thousand negroes either stay at home at ease, or tramp their thirty miles a day with their worldly possessions on their head, and shod by nature with a sole which glides over fresh macadam, hot sand, or soft roadway, with equal impunity. The parish where I had the good fortune to find a friendly reception was on the north side of the island, at a distance of five miles from the sea, near the rolling hills, which in this locality attain an altitude of some 1100 feet. The larger estates produce sugar, rum and pimento, and the small proprietors, who own or rent a few acres, grow coffee and bananas for export, and bread-kind,

which includes white and yellow yams, 66 COCOS (the starchy roots which take the place of our potatoes), plantains and sweet potatoes. Let us concentrate the rambles of a month and start at five, a.m., the earliest daylight in the island; we shall then have three hours of the most delightfu! temperature, when

'Not a breeze disturbs the balmy air,

And every sense is joy."

The air is laden with the fragrance of pimento, orange and lime blossoms, with perhaps a lingering sweetness from some neighboring night jasmine, or trumpet flower, which has been perfuming the air since sunset. We walk along the white limestone macadamized roads, bordered by stone fences, capped with the pinguin, the thorny edges of its blades forming a perfect protection against marauding boys or wandering cattle. The wall forms the home of countless lizards (including the chameleon) which glide into the cracks as we pass along, and is clothed with ferns, which, brown and wrinkled by the four months drought, are taking their winter sleep, to waken up, when the rains come, into new curling fronds, or have the old ones retipped with an emerald fringe. Varieties of climbing cactus crawl and spread themselves snake-like over the walls, and up any tree within reach. One, with triangular stem, is the night-blooming cereus, whose gorgeous bloom, six inches across, deserves a longer life than one tropical night. ooking over the wall we come, perhaps, to a pimento pen. The dark green leaves and upright growth put one in mind of a hickory, while the smooth, whitish, peeling trunk resembles a buttonwood. The gathering season is August and September, when the unripe berries are dried in three to six days on barbecues, or concrete floors, built for the purpose in a sunny spot. The leaves are very strongly aromatic when bruised, and are said to be used in the island of St. Thomas indiscriminately with the leaves of E. acris for making bay rum, Eugenia pimenta and Eugenia acris being two varieties of Myrtacea which very closely resemble one another. I could not hear of any leaves being exported nor of any bay rum, or oil, being made in the island.

The attention of a botanical tramp is soon arrested by a crawling, smooth-barked, thick, round-leaved plant, spreading its branches, but apparently too lazy, or too weak in the spine, to start an independent trunk. It flops along the fence or ground until it obtains the friendly aid of a tree, and instead of winding itself round like a respectable climber, attaches itself firmly straight up the trunk, sending additional branches up from the roots, and roots down from the branches until it completely envelopes the tree and strangles out its life in course of time, assuming all the airs of a respectable monarch of the forest, and tries to gain a good reputation by bearing miserable little figs. Such is the wild fig tree with its thick milky juice, and tough inner bark, used for ropes, &c. Parasitical and epiphytal plants grow in immense variety of form and size, from the

smallest, with leaves of half an inch and perfect panicle of flowers on a stem of 1 inches, up to the "old man's beard" and wild pine, living and blooming on the large trees, eventually perhaps destroying them. The shady mangoes with their green or golden fruit, the immense cotton trees with their enormous buttresses, now leafless, but with opening pods strewing the ground with gray silky fibre, and the orange and lime trees, beautiful with fruit and bloom at the same time, are but a few of the new faces which a northerner meets and would like to linger over. We cannot omit the bamboo, that beautiful giant tropical grass shooting up its feathery foliage with a growth of twenty-five feet in a month, in clusters or stools on the margin of the well-appreciated ponds. The glory of a tropical scene is, however, the princely palm, without which no view would be complete. Drawings and descriptions may familiarize the eye to their forms, but their presence compels a quiet admiration. Their growth is something as follows. They form the crown a few feet from the ground in three or four years; in three or four more they commence bearing, and month by month ripening their fruit renew their giant fronds, and raise their crowned heads higher and higher until some unkind wind carries them away and they die, leaving their solid trunks to the builder and artizan. How many of the five hundred species grow in Jamaica I cannot say, but believe they would all grow if planted. The cocoa nuts ripen in about 18 months, cabbage palm, areca palm, date palm, &c., all beautiful and useful, would require a book of description.

As we turn a point in the road which gives us a view of a fertile valley, a sugar estate may perhaps come under notice, with its green billows of waving canes, looking just as it may have looked any time for the past hundred years (many of the estates are older and few younger than this), except that during the next 18 months that brown field tinged with the green young canes, sprouting though there has been no rain for three months, will pass through the different shades of green and then look as yonder field does now, the ten feet canes falling beneath the cutlasses of the negro men and women. The stems are tied in bundles, and drawn by oxen to the works, where iron rollers press out a milky rivulet of juice, which is treated with lime, evaporated to crystallizing point, cooled, and either put into a "centrifugal," or placed in hogsheads to drain, the molasses being converted into rum.

Passing on, our road leads down to the sea shore, where I made the acquaintance of logwood. The growth is much like our hawthorn, but with very small, round, pinnate leaves. Its fragrant blossoms attract many beautiful humming birds. The alburnum is nearly white, hence the trees must be of large size before they are worth cutting, the outer wood being chopped off before selling. Fustic I was not successful in finding, and enquiries after quassia produced the invariable "im doant grow ya massa,"

until I found it known as "bitter wood," a fine tree, with variegated bark, and light green pinnate leaves like the young foliage of butternut. The coming new remedy demands a notice. Hiding its virtues in the sleepy island of Jamaica, the papaw-tree (Carica Papaya) has been for years building up a reputation for making the toughest meat tender, until now they say you have only to tie the live animal under the tree to produce this effect. Its virtues have at length burst upon the medical world through a French journal, as the new digestive, with wonderful virtue, and our list of materia medica has obtained a new recruit to worry the student, and the analyst will have the chance of coining a few more names. If experiments on some of the dried fruit juice prove successful, the readers of the JOURNAL may hear from me.

Turning our back on the avenues of aloe plants, many with a candelabra of yellow bloom 25 feet in height-their first and last flowering--and the many other attractions of the sea shore road, which it makes one hot even to think of, we have time to look at the peasantry going perhaps to market, walking beside the pannier laden donkeys, carrying their dinner with them in the shape of eight feet of sugar cane, everything carried on their heads, from an empty bottle to a five gallon jug of water, brought perhaps for miles, school children with books, slate and bottle of ink, and a woman with a coil of brown rope which her gallant helpmate dispenses as tobacco at 3d. per yard. We pass, perhaps, a company of stone breakers, principally women, sitting down in front of their pile, singing and keeping time with the hammers, enjoying the rays of a tropical sun, which seems to penetrate the sunshade hat and clothing of a white man until he is glad to place a protecting roof over him. Their language is English, even to the abuse of the aspirate, but one might safely overhear them plotting a murder. if you get them to repeat slowly a remark you may perhaps understand them after a little practice. Their geographical ideas extend to two countries, England and America. I met, when sketching on the sea shore, a smart-looking young carpenter, who wanted to know where I came from, but could not tell to which of the two countries Canada belonged. I found a difficulty in explaining the geographical and political position of the Dominion. He finally asked my name. The reason for such a request was "Meap me see buckra fra Merica some day, me ask him ow you was."

My visit to the island terminated with a drive of nine hours across the island to Spanish Town (thence by rail to Kingston), through a panorama of hills and valleys which I was determined to enjoy, for it cost thirty dollars, besides lemonade. It is true I bought two large pine apples for 3d., which might make a better general average in the hands of a good accountant. Space will not permit me to tell of Kingston, with its beautiful market place, its curbstone merchants, peeling ginger during leisure moments, its