Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 345 of 406 - First - Home
The Change Of Colour Which The
Mixture Undergoes Is Owing To The Decomposition Of A Hydruret Of
Carbon; The Hydrogen Is Burned, And The Carbon Is Set Free.
The curare
is sold in little calabashes; but its preparation being in the hands
of a few families, and the quantity of poison attached to each dart
being extremely small, the best curare, that of Esmeralda and
Mandavaca, is sold at a very high price.
This substance, when dried,
resembles opium; but it strongly absorbs moisture when exposed to the
air. Its taste is an agreeable bitter, and M. Bonpland and myself have
often swallowed small portions of it. There is no danger in so doing,
if it be certain that neither lips nor gums bleed. In experiments made
by Mangili on the venom of the viper, one of his assistants swallowed
all the poison that could be extracted from four large vipers of
Italy, without being affected by it. The Indians consider the curare,
taken internally, as an excellent stomachic. The same poison prepared
by the Piraoas and Salives, though it has some celebrity, is not so
much esteemed as that of Esmeralda. The process of this preparation
appears to be everywhere nearly the same; but there is no proof that
the different poisons sold by the same name at the Orinoco and the
Amazon are identical, and derived from the same plants. Orfila,
therefore, in his excellent work On Poisons, has very judiciously
separated the wourali of Dutch Guiana, the curare of the Orinoco, the
ticuna of the Amazon, and all those substances which have been too
vaguely united under the name of American poisons. Possibly at some
future day, one and the same alkaline principle, similar to morphine
and strychnia, will be found in poisonous plants belonging to
different genera.
At the Orinoco the curare de raiz (of the root) is distinguished from
the curare de bejuco (of lianas, or of the bark of branches). We saw
only the latter prepared; the former is weaker, and much less
esteemed. At the river Amazon we learned to distinguish the poisons of
the Ticuna, Yagua, Peva, and Xibaro Indians, which being all obtained
from the same plant, perhaps differ only by a more or less careful
preparation. The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so
much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear
the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the
island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon. This poison is employed
partly by the Ticunas, who remain independent on the Spanish territory
near the sources of the Yacarique; and partly by Indians of the same
tribe, inhabiting the Portuguese mission of Loreto. The poisons we
have just named differ totally from that of La Peca, and from the
poison of Lamas and of Moyobamba. I enter into these details because
the vestiges of plants which we were able to examine, proved to us
(contrary to the common opinion) that the three poisons of the
Ticunas, of La Peca, and of Moyobamba are not obtained from the same
species, probably not even from congeneric plants.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 345 of 406
Words from 179090 to 179613
of 211397