French Negroes may have brought the name with them: but then arose another wonder.

How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered?
How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil's work, and what long practice--considering its visual slowness and dulness--must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge.

It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known.

Why not?
As the Spaniards say, 'The devil knows many things, because he is old.' Surely this is one of the many facts which point toward some immensely ancient civilisation in the Tropics, and a civilisation which may have had its ugly vices, and have been destroyed thereby.
Now we left the Cacao grove: and I was aware, on each side of the trace, of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams; strange colossal shapes towering up, a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach; for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half- cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling; and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the 'rastrajo,' which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared--all utterly impassable.

These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me.