Located in the I-20 Georgia Welcome Station. Please
re-hide so it can't easily be seen.
Back in 1630, the Countess of Chinchon was not too happy when her
husband came home and informed her that he had been given the
"honor" of becoming the new Viceroy in charge of Peru. She had to
leave her lovely home in Spain for the wilds of the New
World.
It was also well known that people who went to the New World often
died or became ill with malaria. There was no European remedy at
that time, but the natives had one. The Countess decided to give
their remedy a try. Pretty soon, she was paying Peruvians to look
for a certain tree and harvest its bark. With her special powder
that she made from pulverizing the bark of these trees, she cured
her husband and many other locals.
About a hundred years later, when Carl Linnaeus set up his system
of classification of living things, he honored the Contessa for all
time. When he got to naming in scientific jargon, the Latin name
for all of the quinine bark-producing trees, he gave the genus name
"Chinchona" to nearly 160 species of these trees. (In case you
can't remember, it goes from most general to most specific in the
order: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.) The
genus name of Chinchona honored the clever Countess of Chinchon who
learned from the local natives how to treat malaria with
quinine.
Bring your own pencil. Magnetic & small but not a key
box.
FTF: MiniMoose &
MariettaMoose