posted: December 31, 2002 | by chelsie

In 1672, Cephaelis ipecacuanha (Brotera) A. Richard [sef ay' lis ip' e ka' ku ana] was first introduced to Europe. Jesuit missionaries knew of this Brazilian rainforest plant much earlier. In 1601, Manoel Tristaon had written of its value in treating the bloudie fluxe (dysentery). Before the 1700s, dysentery was frequently fatal to adults and almost always fatal to children as toxemia and dehydration took their toll on the body. ("Cephaelis Ipecacuanha", John Uri Lloyd, The Western Druggist, 1897)  [Click here to read more...]

posted: December 24, 2002 | by chelsie

It was Christmas Eve 1944. Nightfall came early. The water in the English Channel was 48 degrees; seas ranged eight to twelve feet. The 2,235 soldiers were exhausted from days of truck and train transport. The young men of the 262nd and 264th Regiments, 66th Infantry Division were reinforcements for the Allied troops in France. The men bedded down as best they could aboard the crowded troopship Leopoldville.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: December 17, 2002 | by chelsie

There are 25 species of coffee, but seventy percent of all coffee consumed in the world comes from Coffea arabica Linnaeus. Arabica coffee is native to Ethiopia where the greatest genetic diversity in the species is found. Coffea arabica is a tetraploid--four sets of eleven chromosomes. This unique genetic make-up has given rise to the numerous naturally flavored coffees like Ethiopian Harrar, the Mochas, Jamaican Blue Mountain, and Kenya AA.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: December 10, 2002 | by chelsie

About 1,000 years ago, the Norse mined and smelted bog iron in the marshes of Newfoundland. The Norse settlements eventually failed. The bog iron industry renewed in the 1600s when colonists began settling along the eastern seaboard--New Jersey, Long Island, and northward into Massachusetts.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: December 3, 2002 | by chelsie

In 1597, John Gerard mentioned few utilitarian uses for the plant he called Cats Taile. "The Roots be hard, thicke, and white, full of strings, and good to burne, where there is plenty thereof to be had." There was an industry using cattails for he stated, "This Downe in some places of the Isle of Elie, and the low countries adjoining thereto, is gathered and well sold to make mattresses of, for plowmen and poore people." (The Herbal, 1633 ed.) It is probably safe to assume that at least in rural areas of Europe, cattail leaves were used for animal bedding and thatch.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: November 26, 2002 | by chelsie

The sheets of ice that alternately covered and retreated during the Pleistocene left behind a landscape ground flat by the great weight of frozen water sometimes more than a mile thick (1600 meters). At the terminus or leading edge, the glaciers melted and deposited the loads of mineral dust and rock, moraines. The moraines often trapped the remaining meltwater; wetlands and slow moving streams formed within the flattened landscape. Sphagnum mosses pioneered the revegetation of these wetlands. Millennia of Sphagnum growth built peat soils.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: November 19, 2002 | by chelsie

In 1607, the settlers of Jamestown (Virginia) were no more prepared to build a colony than the earlier settlement at Roanoke (North Carolina). The Roanoke colony started in 1587 with 117 men, women, and children; it vanished before 1590. Of the 214 Jamestown group, half were listed as gentlemen and by winter the colony was starving. The Powhatan brought enough maize for Jamestown to survive that first winter; the following spring the Powhatan taught the colonists how to plant the American grain.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: November 12, 2002 | by chelsie

Confucius in the sixth century BCE mentioned ornamental mums, considered second of China's 'Four Most Graceful Plants'. Besides adorning gardens, mums found their way into cuisine, tea, and art. By the first century CE, the Chinese discovered the first botanical insecticide from the flowers of at least one species of mum. (Timetables of Science, A. Hellemans and B. Bunch, Touchstone, 1988)  [Click here to read more...]

posted: November 5, 2002 | by chelsie

The discovery of the cardioactive properties of the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea Linnaeus) was perhaps one of the most important steps toward modern medicine. In the 1780s, William Withering came to understand the correlation between heart function and health. Withering did not know why foxglove worked, but he knew when the heart beat stronger, the edema (dropsy) decreased, and the patients got better.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 29, 2002 | by chelsie

Hydrops or dropsy was a watery illness--edema. Blood returning to the heart was under low pressure, fluids leaked from the capillaries filling the tissues, the body became bloated. Medical practitioners cut drains in a sufferer's abdomen to allow fluids to escape. It brought temporary relief, but surgery without anesthesia or antibiotics was its own grief.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 22, 2002 | by chelsie

Cultivation of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum Linnaeus) in India started with its introduction during the age of the Silk Road. Opium was a thriving business when the British gained control over the subcontinent. By 1831, British-controlled India had a worldwide monopoly on opium.  [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 15, 2002 | by chelsie

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum Linnaeus) is native to southeastern Europe and western Asia. Crude opium has been used as a sleep-inducer and misused as a narcotic for thousands of years. Nicholas Culpeper (The English Physitian, 1652) recommended opium to treat epilepsy, insomnia, headaches, and agues (fevers).  [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 8, 2002 | by chelsie

In the early days of World War II, chemists with the Chemical Warfare Service jelled gasoline using latex from the Para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis (Willdenow ex A. Jussieu) Müller Aargau). Jelled gasoline shot further from flamethrowers, stuck to the target better, and burned longer. With the advent of the U.S. entering the war in the Pacific, latex for the production of rubber was in short supply. [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 1, 2002 | by chelsie

The machinery of the early Twentieth Century--trucks, motorcycles, tanks, airplanes--changed how the world went to war. Engines and machines were possible because of rubber, the modified latex of Hevea brasiliensis (Willdenow ex A. Jussieu) Müller Aargau. The military would find another wartime use for latex. [Click here to read more...]