text: Economic significance The "fever tree" was finally described carefully by astronomer Charles Marie de la Condamine, who visited Quito in 1735 on a quest to measure an arc of the meridian. The species he described, Cinchona officinalis, however, was found to be of little therapeutic value. The first living plants seen in Europe were C. calisaya plants grown at the Jardin des Plantes from seeds collected by Hugh Algernon Weddell from Bolivia in 1846. José Celestino Mutis, physician to the Viceroy of Nueva Granada, Pedro Messia de la Cerda, gathered information on cinchona in Colombia from 1760 and wrote a manuscript, El Arcano de la Quina (1793), with illustrations. He proposed a Spanish expedition to search for plants of commercial value, which was approved in 1783 and was continued after his death in 1808 by his nephew Sinforoso Mutis. As demand for the bark increased, the trees in the forests began to be destroyed. To maintain their monopoly on cinchona bark, Peru and surrounding countries began outlawing the export of cinchona seeds and saplings beginning in the early 19th century.
  The colonial European powers eventually considered growing the plant in other parts of the tropics. The French mission of 1743, of which de la Condamine was a member, lost their cinchona 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. 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 C. succirubra, or red bark, (now C. pubescens) as its sap turned red on contact with air, and Cinchona calisaya. The alkaloids quinine and cinchonine were extracted by Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou in 1820. Two more key alkaloids, quinidine and cinchonidine, were later identified and it became a routine in quinology to examine the contents of these components in assays. The yields of quinine in the cultivated trees were low and time was needed to develop sustainable methods to extract bark.