Kino

Kino is the dried juice of a handsome timber tree, Pterocarpus marsupium, a native of the southern parts of the Indian Peninsula and Ceylon. It is also obtained from several other trees which partake of the qualities of an astringent drug. One of these, Pterocarpus indicus, is a tree of Southern India, the Malay Peninsula, and the Philippine Islands. The drug, used by natives from time immemorial, was introduced into commerce by Fothergill (244), 1757. It came from the River Gambia, in Western Africa, where it had been previously noticed by Moore (449), who in his "Travels Into the Inland Parts of Africa," 1737, mentioned the product under the name kano. Mungo Park, 1805, sent specimens of the tree to England, and from that date African kino has been a regular product of the English drug market. According to Duncan (202) in the Edinburgh Dispensatory, 1803, kino as found in England was an African product, but he recognizes a variety, indistinguishable from this, coming from Jamaica. In the 1811 edition of the same work he asserts that the African drug is out of market, and that the East India Company now supply the market from Jamaica and New South Wales. It is evident that, as with Krameria, many species and varieties of the tree, native to widely different sections of the world, produce the substance known as kino, which, aside from the East India tree, Pterocarpus marsupium, are accepted as being very nearly identical with the material yielded by the kino tree of tropical Africa. Kino is obtained by incising the tree and removing the red jelly as it exudes, then drying it by exposure to the air. It is mildly astringent, and has been used in the manufacture of wine.

The History of the Vegetable Drugs of the U.S.P., 1911, was written by John Uri Lloyd.