Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

242 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP.
food for cattle, and were there made fast for the
night. Here we slept tranquilly, save that we
were occasionally aroused by the snuffing of bears
before daylight Bermeo and his
around us ; and
companion were on foot, and making their way
through the forest in quest of Cinchona trees.
They returned at 7 o'clock, having found only
a single tree standing, and from that one the bark
had been stripped near the root, so that it was
dead and leafless. We breakfasted, and then I
accompanied them into the forest. We followed
the track they had already opened, and then
few minutes with
plunged deeper in, meeting every
prostrate naked trunks of the Cinchona, but with
none standing. Bermeo several times climbed
trees on the hill-sides, whence he could look over
a large expanse of forest, but could nowhere get
sight of the large red leaves of the Cinchona. At
length we began to tire, and we decided on return-
ing towards our hut, making a detour along a
declivity which we had not yet explored. We
went on still a long time with the same fortune,
and were beginning to despair of seeing a living
plant, when we came on a prostrate tree, from
the root of which a slender shoot, 20 feet high, was
growing. My satisfaction may well be conceived,
and my first thought was to verify a report that
had been made to me by every one who had
collected Cascarilla, namely, that the trees had
and incredible
milky juice, which to me was strange
in the Rubiaceae. Bermeo made a slit in the bark
with the point of his cutlass, and I at once saw
what was the real fact. The juice is actually
colourless, but the instant it is exposed to the air