considered as a salutary aliment. How are we to account for this
singular course in the development of knowledge? How have the
unlearned inhabitants of one hemisphere become cognizant of a fact
which, in the other, so long escaped the sagacity of the scientific?
It is because a small number of elements and principles differently
combined are spread through several families of plants; it is because
the genera and species of these natural families are not equally
distributed in the torrid, the frigid, and the temperate zones; it is
that tribes, excited by want, and deriving almost all their
subsistence from the vegetable kingdom, discover nutritive principles,
farinaceous and alimentary substances, wherever nature has deposited
them in the sap, the bark, the roots, or the fruits of vegetables.
That amylaceous fecula which the seeds of the cereal plants furnish in
all its purity, is found united with an acrid and sometimes even
poisonous juice, in the roots of the arums, the Tacca pinnatifida, and
the Jatropha manihot. The savage of America, like the savage of the
South Sea islands, has learned to dulcify the fecula, by pressing and
separating it from its juice. In the milk of plants, and in the milky
emulsions, matter extremely nourishing, albumen, caseum, and sugar,
are found mixed with caoutchouc and with deleterious and caustic
principles, such as morphine and hydrocyanic acid.* (* Opium contains
morphine, caoutchouc, etc.) These mixtures vary not only in the
different families, but also in the species which belong to the same
genus. Sometimes it is morphine or the narcotic principle, that
characterises the vegetable milk, as in some papaverous plants;
sometimes it is caoutchouc, as in the hevea and the castilloa;
sometimes albumen and caseum, as in the cow-tree.

The lactescent plants belong chiefly to the three families of the
euphorbiaceae, the urticeae, and the apocineae.* (* After these three