Cinchona lost their plants when a wave took them off their ship. The Dutch sent Justus Hasskarl who brought plants that were then cultivated in Java from 1854. The English explorer Clements Markham went to collect plants that were introduced in Sri Lanka and the Nilgiris of southern India in 1860. The main species introduced were "Cinchona succirubra" or red bark, as its sap turned red on contact with air, and "Cinchona calisaya". The alkaloids quinine and cinchonine were extracted by Pelletier and Caventou in 1820. Later two more key alkaloids, quinidine and cinchonidine were identified and it became a routine
Bark (botany) the ground to where the main branching starts) of the tree. Bark tissues make up by weight between 10–20% of woody vascular plants and consists of various biopolymers, tannins, lignin, suberin, suberan and polysaccharides. Up to 40% of the bark tissue is made of lignin which forms an important part of a plant providing structural support by crosslinking between different polysaccharides, such as cellulose. Condensed tannin, which are in fairly high concentration in bark tissue, is thought to inhibit decomposition. It could be due to this factor that the degradation of lignin is far less pronounced in bark tissue than