It is possible that Dr. de Vry, in his earnest desire to discover quinine in a species upon which so much labour and anxiety, and such vast sums of money, had been expended, may have been deceived by appearances. Both from the form of the capsules, the absence of quinine in the upper bark, and the locality whence it was procured, there is every reason to fear that the _C. Pahudiana_ is a worthless kind; and the bark of this species, which has been sent to the Exhibition of 1862, is so evidently valueless that no dealer would buy it. In all valuable species there is a good percentage of alkaloids in the upper bark, and a very much smaller proportion, which, too, is amorphous and of little commercial value, in the bark of the roots. This law of nature, the existence of which is proved by all experience, would have to be reversed in order to enable the Dutch to extract large supplies of quinine from the roots of a species, such as _C. Pahudiana_, which contains none in the upper bark.
It is much to be regretted that the scientific men in Java, instead of exerting all their skill and talent in the work of cultivating _C. Calisaya_ and _C. lancifolia_, of the value of which there is no doubt, should have filled the forests of Java with a kind which from the first was known to be of very doubtful value, was unknown in commerce, and the cultivation of which will, it is to be feared, only end in loss and disappointment.
The valuable species were found to be much more tender, and more sensitive to external unfavourable influences, than the _C. Pahudiana_; the latter was therefore propagated rapidly, and unwisely allowed to outstrip the other kinds in the race, and the consequence has been that it has gained an immense preponderance. Thus, so far as valuable species of chinchona-plants are concerned, the Dutch experiment in Java has been attended by a very small measure of success. After three years the Dutch gardeners only had forty plants of valuable species in Java, and after six years they had only increased their stock to seven thousand plants. It will presently be seen that far greater results were attained in India within eighteen months of the first introduction of the chinchona-plants.