THE EUCALYPTUS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XI, Issue 3994, 31 August 1874, Page 3

THE EUCALYPTUS.

Mr. Edward Wilson communicates to the Pall Mull Gazette some interesting particulars concerning the eucalyptus, or "fever tree." This plant has the singular property of absorbing ten times its weight of water from the soil, and emitting antiseptic eamphorons cflluvia. When sown in marshy ground it will dry it up in a very short time. The English were the first to try it at the Cape, and within two or three years they completely changed the climatic condition of the unhealthy parts of the colony. At Pardock, twenty miles from Algiers, a farm situated on the banks of the Ilamyxe was noted for its extremely pestilential air. In the spring of ISU7 about 13,000 of the eucalyptus were planted there. In July of the same year— the time when the fever season used to set in —not a single case occurred ; yet the trees were not more than Oft. high. Since then complete immunity from fever has been maintained. In the neighbourhood of Constantino the farm of Ben Maeliydlin was equally in bad repute. It was covered with marshes both in winter and summer. In five years the whole ground was dried up by 14,000 of these trees, aud farmers and children enjoy excellent health. At the factory of the Rue de Constantino, in three years a plantation of eucalyptus has transformed (twelve acres of marshy soil into a magnificent park, whence fever completely disappeared. In the island of Cuba this aud all other paludal diseases are fast disappearing from all the unhealthy districts where this tree has been introduced. A station-house at one of the ends of a railway viaduct in the department of the \ar was so pestilential that the officials could not be kept there longer than a year. Forty of these trees were planted, and it is now as healthy as any other place on the line.

Is it not a bad time to talk of urning the dead while so many honest people are unable to earn a living ? When the pure medicinal restorative, now so widely known as Udolplio Wolfe's Schiedam Schnapps, was introduced into the world under the indorsement of four thousand leading members of the medical profession, some twenty years ago, its proprietor was well aware that ho could not wholly escape the penalty attached to all new and useful preparations. He, therefore, endeavoured to invest it wltu the strongest possible safeguard against counterfeiters and imitators, to reuder all attempts to pirate it diflicult and dangerous. It was submitted to distinguished chemists for analysis, and pronounced by them the purest spirits ever manufactured. Its purity and properties having been thus ascertained, samples of the article were forwarded to ten thousand physicians, including all the leading practitioners in tne United States, for the purpose of experiment, a circular, requesting a trial of the preparation ana report of the result accompanied each specimen. Four thousand of the most eminent medical men im the Union promptly responded. Their opinions of the articles t/ere unanimously favourable, bucna preparation, l liey said, had long been wan.ed by the profes-lon, at no reliance could be placed on tbe ordinary liquors of commerce, all of t or less adulterated, *nd therefore unfit for medical purposes. The peculiar excellence the oil of juniper which formed one of the P r '° ci imrrcdionta of tbe Schnapps, together with an u f" alloyed character of the alcoholic ele the estimation of the faculty, a marked u P«" ori V over every other diffusive stimulant as a diuretic. \ tonic, aiid restorative.