Note 42 — THE PLATEAU OF CAXAMARCA, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE INCA ATAHUALLPA: AND THE FIRST VIEW OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN, FROM THE CREST OF THE ANDES.

p. 268.—“The Countess of Chinchon.”

She was the wife of the Viceroy Don Geronimo Fernandez de Cabrera, Bobadilla y Mendoza, Conde de Chinchon, who administered the government of Peru from 1629 to 1639. The cure of the Vice-Queen falls in the year 1638. A tradition which has obtained currency in Spain, but which I have heard much combated at Loxa, names a Corregidor del Cabildo de Loxa, Juan Lopez de Cañizares, as the person by whom the Quina-bark was first brought to Lima and generally recommended as a remedy. I have heard it asserted in Loxa that the beneficial virtues of the tree were known long before in the mountains, though not generally. Immediately after my return to Europe I expressed the doubts I felt as to the discovery having been made by the natives of the country round Loxa, since even at the present day the Indians of the neighbouring valleys, where intermittent fevers are very prevalent, shun the use of bark. (Compare my memoir entitled “über die China-wälder” in the “Magazin der Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde” zu Berlin, Jahrg. I. 1807, S. 59.) The story of the natives having learnt the virtues of the Cinchona from the lions who “cure themselves of intermittent fevers by gnawing the bark of the China (or Quina) trees,”—(Hist. de l’Acad. des Sciences, année 1738, Paris, 1740, p. 233),—appears to be entirely of European origin, and nothing but a monkish fable. Nothing is known in the New Continent of the “Lion’s fever,” for the large so-called American Lion (Felis concolor), and the small mountain Lion (Puma) whose foot-marks I have seen on the snow, are never tamed and made the subjects of observation; nor are the different species of Felinæ in either continent accustomed to gnaw the bark of trees. The name of Countess’s Powder (Pulvis Comitissæ), occasioned by the remedy having been distributed by the Countess of Chinchon, was afterwards changed to that of Cardinal’s or Jesuit’s powder, because Cardinal de Lugo, Procurator-General of the order of the Jesuits, spread the knowledge of this valuable remedy during a journey through France, and recommended it to Cardinal Mazarin the more urgently, as the brethren of the order were beginning to prosecute a lucrative trade in South American Quina-bark which they obtained through their missionaries. It is hardly necessary to remark, that in the long controversy which ensued respecting the good or bad effects of the fever bark, the protestant physicians sometimes permitted themselves to be influenced by religious intolerance and dislike of the Jesuits.