recent experiments render this opinion doubtful. It is probable that in the case both of tobacco and of the hop, a volatile substance distils over in small quantity along with the oil, which has not hitherto been examined separately, and in which the narcotic virtue resides. This is rendered probable by the fact that the rectified hop oil is not possessed of narcotic properties.

The hop has long been celebrated for its sleep-giving qualities. To the weary and wakeful, the hop-pillow has often given refreshing rest, when every other sleep-producer had failed. It is to the escape, in minute quantity, of the volatile narcotic substance we have spoken of, that this soporific effect of the flowers is most probably to be ascribed.

Besides the oil and other volatile matter which distil from them, the hop flowers, and especially the fine powdery grains or dust which, by rubbing, can be separated from them, yield to alcohol a bitter principle (lupulin) and a resinous substance, both in considerable proportion. In a common tincture of hops these substances are contained. They are aromatic and tonic, and impart their own qualities to our beer. They are also soothing, tranquillising, and in a slight degree sedative and soporific, in which properties well-hopped beer also resembles them. It is certain that hops possess a narcotic virtue which beer derives from them;* but in what part of the female flower, or in what peculiar chemical compound this narcotic property chiefly resides, is still a matter of doubt.

To the general reader it may appear remarkable, that the chemistry of a vegetable production, in such extensive use as the hop, should still be so imperfect-our knowledge of its nature and composition so unsatisfactory. But the well-read chemist, who knows how wide the field of chemical research is, and how rapidly our know

ledge of it, as a whole, is progressing, will feel no surprise. He may wish to see all such obscurities and difficulties cleared away, but he will feel inclined rather to thank and praise the many ardent and devoted men, now labouring in this department, for what they are doing, than to blame them for being obliged to leave a part of the extensive field for the present uncultivated.

Among largely used narcotics, therefore, especially in England, the hop is to be placed. It differs, however, from all the others we have mentioned, in being rarely employed alone except medicinally. It is added to infusions like that of malt, to impart flavour, taste, and narcotic virtues. Used in this way, it is unquestionably one of the sources of that pleasing excitement, gentle intoxication, and healthy tonic action, which well-hopped beer is known to produce upon those who drink it. Other common vegetable productions will give the bitter flavour to malt liquor. Horehound and wormwood, and gentian and quassia and strychnia, and the grains of paradise, and chicory, and various other plants, have been used to replace or supplant the hop. But none are known to approach it in imparting those peculiar qualities which have given the bitter beer of the present day so well-merited a reputation.

Among our working classes, it is true, in the porters and humbler beers they consume and prefer, the Cocculus indicus finds a degree of favour which has caused it, to a considerable degree, to take the place of the hop. This singular berry possesses an intoxicating property, and not only replaces the hop by its bitterness, but to a certain extent also supplies the deficiency of malt. To weak extracts of malt it gives a richness and fulness in the mouth, which usually imply the presence of much malt, with a bitterness which enables the brewer to

withhold one-third of his hops, and a colour which aids him in the darkening of his porter. The middle classes in England prefer the thin wine-like bitter beer. The skilled labourers in the manufacturing districts prefer what is rich, full, and substantial in the mouth. With a view to their taste, it is too often drugged with the Cocculus indicus by disreputable brewers; and much of the very beastly intoxication which the consumption of malt liquor in England produces, is probably due to this pernicious admixture. So powerful is the effect of this berry on the apparent richness of beer, that a single pound produces an equal effect with a bag of malt. The temptation to use it, therefore, is very strong. The quantity imported in 1850 was 2359 cwt., equal to a hundred and twelve times as many bags of malt; and although we cannot strictly class it among the narcotics we voluntarily indulge in, it may certainly be described as one in which thousands of the humbler classes are compelled to indulge.

It is interesting to observe how men carry with them their early tastes to whatever new climate or region they go. The love of beer and hops has been planted by Englishmen in America. It has accompanied them to their new empires in Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape. In the hot East their home taste remains unquenched, and the pale ale of England follows them to remotest India. Who can tell to what extent the use of the hop may become naturalised, through their means, in these far-off regions? Who can predict that, inoculated into its milder influence, the devotees of opium and the intoxicating hemp may not hereafter be induced to abandon their hereditary drugs, and to substitute the foreign hop in their place? From such a change in one article of consumption, how great a change in the character of the people might we not anticipate?

This leads us to remark, that we cannot as yet very well explain in

what way and to what extent the use of prevailing narcotics is connected, as cause or effect, with peculiarities in national character. But there can no longer be any doubt that the soothers and exciters we indulge in, in some measure as the luxuries of life, though sought for at first merely to gratify a natural craving, do afterwards gradually but sensibly modify the individual character. And where the use is general and extended, the influence of course affects in time the whole people. It is a problem of interest to the legislator, not less than to the physiologist and psychologist, to ascertain how far and in what direction such a reaction can go-how much of the actual tastes, habits, and character of existing nations has been created by the prolonged consumption of the fashionable and prevailing forms of narcotics in use among them respectively, and how far tastes and habits have been modified by the changes in these forms which have been introduced and adopted within historic times. The reader will readily perceive that this inquiry has in it a valid importance quite distinct from that which attaches itself to the supposed influence of the different varieties of intoxicating fermented drinks in use in different countries. The latter, as we have said, all contain the same intoxicating principle, and so far, therefore, exercise a common influence upon all who consume them. But the narcotics now in use owe their effects to substances which in each, so far as is known, are chemically different from those which are contained in every one of the others. They must exercise, therefore, each a different physiological effect upon the system, and, if their influence, as we suppose, extend so far, must each in a special way modify also the constitution, the habits, and the character.

Our space does not permit us, in the present Number, to speak of the use of opium and hemp; we shall returu to these extensively consumed drugs on a future occasion.

WE here associate two books which have little in common beyond their relation to the same region and races of men; the one is chiefly scientific and statistical, the other deals largely in the characteristic and romantic. Dr Weddell, physician and naturalist, and member of various scientific societies and commissions, who had previously travelled in and written of certain districts in South America, was induced, two years ago, once more to cross the Line, bound for Bolivia. His former journey had had a purely botanical object: he had gone to make acquaintance with the trees which produce the Peruvian bark. His researches were crowned with success; but he was attacked with fever and dysentery, and quitted the unwholesome shores, vowing never to revisit them. A handful of sand which he carried away with him caused him to break through his resolution. Deposited in the Museum of Natural History at Paris, it attracted attention by the beauty of the golden spangles it contained. Dr Weddell again sailed for America, this time with a double mission. The administrators of the Garden of Plants confided to him certain scientific researches; and a number of persons, whose objects were more material, commissioned him to examine and obtain concessions of tracts of land upon the Tipuani-a stream which, rising amongst the snows of the Cordilleras, flows over golden sands to its junction with one of the chief tributaries of the mighty Amazon.

Mr Theodore Pavie has been a great traveller. In the volume before us we find him alternately in India, Africa, America, on the banks of the Nile, on the Coromandel coast, in the forests that fringe the Sabine. His book includes even a Chinese legend; but that he confesses to have derived from a missionary, the companion of one of his voyages. His most inter

esting chapters are a series of South American sketches-in the Pampas, Chili, and Peru. He makes half an apology for having mingled fiction with facts he himself witnessed. The system he has pursued is perfectly allowable, and has been adopted by many travellers of wider fame. We may instance Sealsfield, Ruxton, and a host of other precedents. Like them, he has brought home from his distant wanderings a portfolio of rough sketches, which he has filled up, coloured, and completed by his own fireside. The landscape, the character, the figures, even some of the incidents, are true to nature; but he has thrown in a little artificial action, rendering the picture more attractive.

From the Peruvian port of Arica, which he reached, viâ Southampton and Panama, in the spring of 1851, Dr Weddell started at once for the Bolivian town of La Paz. After passing Tacna, where they were detained for some days by purchase of mules and travelling stores, the doctor and his two companions, Mr Borniche and Mr Herrypon (the latter a civil engineer), soon found themselves in the mountains, and suffering from the painful sensations produced by the great rarefaction of the air. This effect of the sensible diminution of the atmospheric pressure upon the circulation and respiration is there called the soroche, and is ignorantly attributed by the natives to metallic emanations from the soil. At the height of about 12,000 feet above the level of the sea, the travellers came to the first apacheta. In former days the Peruvian Indians, upon attaining, with a burden, the summit of a mountain, were accustomed to offer to their god Pachacamac the first object that met their view. The custom was not costly, for the object was usually a stone. They accompanied the offering by several repetitions of the word

Par THÉODORE PAVIE. Paris, Lévy.

1853.

apachecta, which was a sort of prayer. In time, this word, slightly altered, was applied to the heaps of stones which the superstition accumulated, and then to the mountain-peaks which these heaps surmounted. Apachetas are found upon all elevated points of Peruvian roads. Around one of them, at the summit of the Pass of Gualillos -estimated by Dr Weddell, and by the English traveller Pentland, to be nearly 15,000 feet above the seawere numerous skeletons of asses, mules, and lamas, which had perished of fatigue on attaining that prodigious elevation. The three Frenchmen felt almost as much inclined to lay their own bones beside those of the defunct brutes as to push on further; but they managed to continue their route over one of those vast mountain platforms known as puñas, of which the German doctor Tschudi has given so striking an account. They passed the night in the village of Tacora, and had regained their wonted courage and activity when aroused next morning by their muleteer with intelligence that four vicuñas were grazing close at hand. Stealing up to them under cover of a wall, Dr Weddell and Mr Herrypon got within fair shot, fired, and missed. Three of the animals took to flight; the fourth stood its ground, and gazed boldly at its enemies. The doctor, supposing that a wound was the cause of its immobility, quitted his cover and approached the vicuña. When he got within a certain distance, the animal

ran.

It was too late. The doctor fired his second barrel, and the ball broke its spine. It was not, as Dr Weddell had supposed, a wound that had delayed its flight. "When a herd of vicuñas is pursued," he says, "the most vigorous of the males, who act as chiefs, invariably remain the last upon the place of danger, as if to cover the retreat of the others. This is a fact of which we were more than once witnesses during our journey, and hence it is much easier to obtain male than female vicuñas. I have been twenty times within shot of males, but not once of females. The vicuña (Camelus vicogna Gmel.) is the most numerous species (it and the guanaco) of the camel tribe in the New World. It is met with in all

even

the elevated regions of the Andes, from the equator to Magellan's Straits. The places it best loves to haunt are those where man and the condor alone can follow it. The condor, that mighty bird of prey, which is to the Andes what the cagle is to the Alps, prefers carrion to a living prey, and seldom makes war upon it; and man, until our own days, has rather encouraged its multiplication than aided in its destruction. This explains the abundance of the vicuña at the period of the conquest of Peru." The old Spanish chroniclers relate that the vicuñas, although wild, were regarded as the exclusive property of the Incas, and any who hunted them incurred severe penalties. At fixed seasons-about once a-year-a general hunt took place, under the personal superintendence of the Inca and his chief officers; but only once in every four years was this monster battue allowed in the same district. The chase was on a prodigious scale. Fifty or sixty thousand hunters more, if some writers are to be believed-armed themselves with poles and lances, traced an immense circle, and drove to a common centre all the animals it enclosed. A selection then took place. Roebuck, guanacos, and other inferior animals, were killed, especially the males; their skins were used for various purposes, and their flesh was divided amongst the hunters. This meat, cut in thin slices and dried, was called charqui, and composed the sole animal food of the lower classes of Peruvians. vicuñas, of which thirty or forty thousand were often thus collected, were more gently treated. They were carefully shorn, and then set at liberty. The wool was stored in the royal warehouses, and issued as required-the inferior qualities to the people, the better ones to the nobles, who alone had a right to wear fine cloth. The tissues then manufactured from the best vicuña wool are said to have been as brilliant as the finest silks, and to have excited, by the delicacy of their tints, the envy of European manufacturers. At the present day, no salutary law protects the graceful and useful vicuñas; they lose their life with their fleece, and have greatly diminished in numbers.

The

The Indians drive them into enclosures, knock them on the head with cudgels, or break their necks across their knees, strip off the skin, and sell it for half a dollar. The wool sells as high as a dollar a pound upon the coast of Peru. It is chiefly consumed in the country, to make hats and gloves. Only two or three thousand dollars' worth is annually exported from Peru.

Dr Weddell makes numerous interesting zoological observations during his journey up the country. Whilst traversing the frozen puña, he was greatly surprised to find a ruinin which his party slept, with snow for a counterpane infested with mice, whose sole nourishment, in that barren and inhospitable district, must have been grass. The next

halt was at the farm of Chulunguiani, the highest point upon the road from Tacna to La Paz. Here the party slept under a roof, and found a pulperia or little shop, where they were able to obtain sardines in oil, sheep's-milk cheese, and bad Bordeaux wine. A day was passed here in duck-shooting, and in hunting the viscacha, a small animal of the chinchilla tribe, having a dark grey fur, very soft, but less esteemed by furriers than that of the chinchilla. It is about the size of a rabbit, burrows amongst rocks, and is found only at a very great elevation, equal to that habitually preferred by the vicuña. Dr Weddell and his host shot two specimens. When the doctor went indoors to skin them, he found that the animals had lost the tips of their tails. The farm-steward, who had carried them in, explained that he had thus docked them to preserve them from decomposition, the extremity of the tail having the singular property of producing the corruption of the whole animal, if not cut off almost immediately after death. Dr Weddell was not very well satisfied with this explanation, but, to his astonishment, he afterwards found it everywhere the custom to sever the end of the viscacha's tail.

Whilst at the farm (it was a sheepfarm-oxen live but do not thrive at that altitude) Dr Weddell did his

utmost to get an alpaca, knowing that there were some in the neighbourhood. He was unsuccessful; and as to buying one, it is a most difficult matter in that country, where the Indians have an extraordinary dislike to parting with their domesticated animals, except sheep. During his stay in Bolivia, he repeatedly offered five or six times its value for an alpaca, and was refused. The alpaca wool, which constitutes one of the most important branches of Peruvian commerce, and is consumed chiefly in England, varies greatly in price, the pure white selling for thirty or thirty-five dollars a hundredweight; other colours at an average of twenty-two dollars. The weight of the fleeces ranges from three to seven pounds. "I have seen some of these animals," says Dr Weddell, "whose virgin fleece almost swept the earth; when they attain that state, their faces are hidden in the wool that surrounds them." From a priest, who afforded hospitality to the travellers at their second halt after they quitted the farm, they obtained some instructive details concerning the country, and a most marvellous story of a natural phenomenon observed by him during his rambles in the province of Yungas. "This was nothing less than a bird-plant-that is to say, a bird which, having alighted upon the ground, had there taken root. More than a hundred persons, the cura said, had seen this wonder, and verified its reality. The person who had discovered the bird, unfortunately forgot one day to take it food, and it died. We were not informed how it had lived before it found a master." It is odd to be able to trace a coincidence between the wild tale of the Peruvian puña and a tradition of Asiatic- Russian steppes. Edward Jerrmann, in his Pictures from St Petersburg,* tells of the baranken or sheep-plant, supposed to produce the fine silky fleece that was in reality obtained by ripping unborn lambs from the mother's belly.

At La Paz, which the little caravan reached after much fatigue, some severe hardship, and a few misadventures, but without serious disaster, one of the first things the travellers