Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Fontana, In His Experiments On The
Poison Of The Ticuna Of The Amazon, Long Since Proved That The Vapours
Arising
From this poison, when thrown on burning charcoal, may be
inhaled without danger and that the statement of La Condamine,
That
Indian women, when condemned to death, have been killed by the vapours
of the poison of the ticuna, is incorrect.
The most concentrated juice of the mavacure is not thick enough to
stick to the darts; and therefore, to give a body to the poison,
another vegetable juice, extremely glutinous, drawn from a tree with
large leaves, called kiracaguero, is poured into the concentrated
infusion. As this tree grows at a great distance from Esmeralda, and
was at that period as destitute of flowers and fruits as the bejuco de
mavacure, we could not determine it botanically. I have several times
mentioned that kind of fatality which withholds the most interesting
plants from the examination of travellers, while thousands of others,
of the chemical properties of which we are ignorant, are found loaded
with flowers and fruits. In travelling rapidly, even within the
tropics, where the flowering of the ligneous plants is of such long
duration, scarcely one-eighth of the trees can be seen furnishing the
essential parts of fructification. The chances of being able to
determine, I do not say the family, but the genus and species, is
consequently as one to eight; and it may be conceived that this
unfavourable chance is felt most powerfully when it deprives us of the
intimate knowledge of objects which afford a higher interest than that
of descriptive botany.
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