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GENERAL REPORT OF THE JUDGES OF GROUP VI. some millions of people, and the exhibits were varied and numerous. Even acorns and pine-nuts, as articles of human food, as well as for animals, were exhibited from several countries. Of cork we have already spoken, as being largely the product of Spain and Portugal. These countries appear to be the great pro ducers of this necessary article, partly because of favorable climate and soil, but more because of the existence of the systems of public forest-culture and administration. Small specimens were shown from several other countries. Several species of cinchona furnish the “ Fever-bark,” which is the raw material from which quinine and a few other similar medicinal alkaloids are extracted. Thirty-six species are known to science, all natives of the tropical Andes. All contain quinine, but only a small part of them are of much importance in commerce. As its use spread throughout the civilized world, and the methods for chemically ex tracting the drug were improved, the demand rapidly increased, and the natural supply of bark as rapidly decreased. When a demand arises for any forest-product, the native forests are soon despoiled of the trees which produce it, for no trees growing wild, and especially if they are the property of no one in particular, can withstand the reckless and improvident attacks made by those who procure the crude materials for commerce. The more valuable the product or more urgent the demand, the more sure the destruction. This has been the history of various products, and is emphatically that of the quinine-producing trees, where the raw product is the bark, a vital part of the tree. As the demand for the drug becomes more imperious and the natural supply more uncertain, the necessity for its cultivation becomes more obvious. The Netherlands claim to have been the first to produce the bark as a commercial product from trees arti ficially planted, in their East India colonies, and their exhibit was by far the finest of its kind in the Exhibition. According to the Netherlands Sectional Catalogue, the first cinchona-trees were introduced into Java from European Botanic Gardens in 1851. In 1852 a botanist was sent by the Dutch Government to Peru, where he investigated the different species in their native localities, and collected plants and seeds of the more valuable species. Some of these were sent to Holland via Panama, and thence to the Dutch East Indies, but more were carried in 1854, by a Dutch man-of-war sailing directly from Callao to Java. From that time to this the cultivation has gone on, and in March, 1875, the several Government plantations contained more than two millions of trees, the whole under charge of the chemist and botanist, J. C. Bernelot Moens, who