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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The Negroes And Natives Are
Then Seen Hastening From All Quarters, Furnished With Large Bowls To
Receive The Milk, Which Grows Yellow, And Thickens At Its Surface.
Some Empty Their Bowls Under The Tree Itself; Others Carry The Juice
Home To Their Children.
In examining the physical properties of animal and vegetable products,
science displays them as closely linked together; but it strips them
of what is marvellous, and perhaps, therefore, of a part of their
charms.
Nothing appears isolated; the chemical principles that were
believed to be peculiar to animals are found in plants; a common chain
links together all organic nature.
Long before chemists had recognized small portions of wax in the
pollen of flowers, the varnish of leaves, and the whitish dust of our
plums and grapes, the inhabitants of the Andes of Quindiu made tapers
with the thick layer of wax that covers the trunk of a palm-tree.* (*
Coroxylon andicola.) It is but a few years since we discovered, in
Europe, caseum, the basis of cheese, in the emulsion of almonds; yet
for ages past, in the mountains of the coast of Venezuela, the milk of
a tree, and the cheese separated from that vegetable milk, have been
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.
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