Flora Medica

CROZOPHORA.subulate segments. Capsule sound, leprous with starry scurf, tricoccous.Seeds somewhat angular. An acrid plant, with emetic,drastic, corrosive properties. Its seeds, ground into powder and mixedwith oil, are employed as a cathartic medicine. It is cultivated for thedeep purple dye called Turnsole which is obtained from it.CROTON.Flowers monoecious or very rarelydirecious. Calyx 5-parted.$ Petals . 5. Stamens 10 or more, distinct. .? Petals 0.Styles 3, divided into 2 or more partitions. Capsule tricoccous.A.deJ.360. C. Cascarilla Linn. sp. pi. 1424. Willd. iv. 531C. lineare Jacq. amer. 256. t. 162. f. 4. (Sloane i. t. 86. f. 1.)West India islands ; Jamaica, St. Domingo.Young branches covered with a fine close scaly yellowish down,which disappears with age. Leaves J to 1^ inch in length, variable inbreadth, linear, quite entire, obtuse at each end, mucronate at thepoint, quite smooth on the upper side, closely covered with a finesilvery or yellowish scaly down on the under side, with 2 or 3 glands atthe base, very much hidden by the fur. Flowers dio3cious, in shortdense terminal downy spikes, about the size of common shot. Thebark called Cascarilla, a most valuable bitter, aromatic, tonic stimulant,abounding in volatile oil, is by some believed to be produced by thistree, which occurs in apart of the West India islands : St. Domingo andJamaica for example. M. Fee states positively that such is the case,but he adds that Cascarilla is brought from Paraguay as well as theWest Indies; and Croton Cascarilla has not been recorded as aParaguay species. Schiede assigns the bark to C. Pseudo-china: anopinion adopted by Mr. Don, who declares that Cascarilla is not importedeither from Jamaica or the Bahamas; Edinb. new phU.journ. xvi. 368 ;which is going back to the old assertion that the bark is imported fromthe Spanish main. But Mr. Pereira has clearly proved, upon the best ofall evidence in this case, viz., the customs entries, that Cascarilla principallycomes from the Bahamas, as has always been asserted by themost original authorities ;and then, taking the authority of Catesby, theauthor of a " Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands,"who assures us that a plant which he figures and describes (2. 46.t.46.) under the name of Ricinoides elaeagni folio, produces the Chacrillaor Ilateria of the Bahamas, Mr. Pereira comes to the conclusion thatthis plant, called C. Cascarilla by Linnaeus, is the true source of theofficinal bark of that name. To this however there are several objections; in the first place Catesby speaks of a bark exported from theBahamas a century ago, and I do not know that any evidence exists toprove that Ilateria and Cascarilla are identical ;moreover it appearsthat at the time when this author visited the Bahamas (1722-4) theplant was already becoming scarce from the quantity of its bark thathad been consumed, and it would not be unreasonable to conclude thatthe supply has in fact ceased. It is also to be noticed that it is impossibleto say what the plant is that Catesby figured j for I know ofno Croton, nor indeed any other plant to which it can belong. If, asis universally believed, it was intended for the C. Cascarilla of Linnaeus,I can only say in that case that it bears that plant the smallest possible179 N 2