Pharmacographia : a history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury.

Friedrich August Flückiger

Date:: 1874

Credit: Pharmacographia : a history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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$both sides with long reddish hairs; these under the microscope are seen each to consist of a simple cylindrical thin-walled cell, the surface of which is beset with numerous extremely small protuberances. The large, bright-yellow, odorous flowers, which become brown in drying, are mostly solitary in the axils of the leaves; they have a persistent campanulate calyx divided into two lips minutely toothed, and a long subulate style, curved round on itself. The legume is oblong, compressed, 1 \ to 2 inches long by about a an inch wide, fringed with hairs along the edge. It contains 10 to 12 olive-coloured albuminous seeds, the funicle of which is expanded into a large fleshy strophiole. They have a bitterish taste, and are devoid of starch. The portion of the plant used in pharmacy is the younger herbaceous branches, which are required both fresh ami dried. In the former state they emit when bruised a peculiar odour which is lost in drying. They have a nauseous bitter taste. Chemical Composition—Stenhouse1 discovered in broom tops two interesting principles, Scoparin, C21H22010, an indifferent or some- what acid body, and the alkaloid Sparteine, C15!!26]^2, the first soluble in water or spirit and crystallizing in yellowish tufts, the second a colourless oily liquid heavier than water and sparingly soluble in it, boiling at 288°C. To obtain scoparin, a watery decoction of the plant is concentrated so as to form a jelly after standing for a day or two. This is then washed with a small quantity of cold water, dissolved in hot water and again allowed to repose. By repeating this treatment with the addition of a little hydrochloric acid, the chlorophyll may at length be separated and the scoparin obtained as a gelatinous mass, which dries as an amorphous, brittle, pale yellow, neutral substance, devoid of taste and smell. Its solution in hot alcohol deposits it partly in crystals and partly as jelly, which after drying are alike in composition. Hlasiwetz showed (1866) that scoparin when melted with potash is resolved like kino or quercetin into Phloroglucin, C6H603, and Protoccitechuic Acid 2 C7H°04. The acid mother-liquors from which scoparin has been obtained, when concentrated and distilled with soda, yield besides ammonia a very bitter oily liquid, Sparteine. To obtain it pure, it requires to be repeatedly rectified, dried by chloride of calcium, and distilled in a cm rent of dry carbonic acid. It is colourless, but becomes brown by exposure to light; it has at first an odour of aniline, but this is altered by rectification. Sparteine has a decidedly alkaline reaction and readily neutralizes acids, forming crystallizable salts which are extremely bitter. Conine, nicotine, and sparteine are the only volatile alkaloids devoid of oxygen hitherto known to exist in the vegetable kingdom. Mills “ extracted sparteine simply by acidulated water, which he concentrated and then distilled with soda. The distillate was then saturated with hydrochloric acid, evaporated to dryness, and submitted to distillation with potash. The oily sparteine thus obtained was dried by prolonged heating with sodium in a current of hydrogen, and finally rectified per se. Mills succeeded in replacing one or two equivalents of the hydrogen of sparteine by one or two of C2TI5 (ethyl). From 150 fix 1 Phil. Trans., 1851. 422-431. 2 jQUrn. 0j chc.m. Soc. xv. (1862) 1 Gmelin's Chcm., xvi. (1864) 282.$