Also 9 oopas. [a. Malay ūpas poison, in the comb. pōhun (or pūhun) ūpas poison-tree.
In senses 1 and 2 correct usage would require the compound upas-tree. The full Malay name has been used by some writers in the inexact forms bohon, bohun, bopon, bou, and boa upas.]
1. A fabulous tree alleged to have existed in Java, at some distance from Batavia, with properties so poisonous as to destroy all animal and vegetable life to a distance of fifteen or sixteen miles around it.
The account given in the London Magazine of 1783, from which Erasmus Darwin adopted and gave currency to the fiction, professed to be translated from one written in Dutch by Mr. Foersch (who was a surgeon at Samarang in 1773), but was app. the invention of George Steevens. The history of the fable is fully traced in Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson, s.v. Upas.
α. 1783. London Mag., 513/1. They are asked…, whether they will go to the Upas tree for a box of poison?
1819. Wiffen, Aonian Hours, 58. His life was like the Upas-tree, The curse of all his kind!
1841. Thackeray, Misc. Ess. (1885), 401. Avoid tobacco as you would the upas plant.
β. 1783. London Mag., 516/2. I have been convinced, that the gum of the Upas is the … most violent of all vegetable poisons.
1789. E. Darwin, Loves of Plants, III. 238. Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath Fell Upas sits, the Hydra-Tree of death.
1815. Helen M. Williams, Pres. St. France, iv. 68. Held in as much abhorrence as if they had shed the poisons of the Upas.
1858. Sears, Athan., ii. 89. The Upas of the desert, and the nightshade of the jungles.
attrib. and Comb. 1838. Ruskin, Scythian Banquet Song, iv. Nor deemed [I] my love, like Upas dew, A plague.
1845. Ford, Handbk. Spain, II. 724. Such is its upas-like atmosphere.
1847. Emerson, Mithridates, 19. Swing me in the upas boughs, Vampyre-fanned, when I carouse.
b. fig. A baleful, destructive, or deadly power or influence.
a. 1801. Southey, Thalaba, IX. II. 200. From that accursed venom springs The Upas Tree of Death.
1824. Westm. Rev., April, 464. That Upas tree, which has since borne all the bitter fruits of Turkish oppression.
1839. Fr. A. Kemble, Resid. in Georgia (1863), 90. This tremendous soil, where one grain of knowledge may spring up a gigantic upas-tree.
1885. E. Garrett, At Any Cost, iv. 64. This failure … lies about the very root of many upas-trees of human life.
β. 1818. Byron, Ch. Har., IV. cxxvi. This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree.
1865. Parkman, Huguenots, viii. (1875), 138. Thus did Spain … crush the upas of heresy in its germ.
1876. Farrar, Marlb. Serm., xxxvi. 359. This is the sole resemblance between the tree of life and the upas of evil.
attrib. 1832. [R. Cattermole], Beckett, etc., 169. Even Despotism’s dark upas-root For us a blessing bore.
1853. Kingsley, Hypatia, I. p. xi. was not the Empire trying to extend over the Church itself that upas shadow with which it had withered up every other form of human existence?
2. Bot. The Javanese tree Antiaris toxicaria, yielding a poisonous juice. (Cf. ANTIAR.)
1814. T. Horsfield, in Thomson’s Ann. Philos., IX. 202. An Essay on the Oopas, or Poison Tree of Java.
1834. Penny Cycl., II. 98/2. There is such a tree as the upas, and its juice, if mixed with the blood…, is speedily fatal. Ibid., 420/2. The Upas tree of Java.
1872. Oliver, Elem. Bot., II. 234. The celebrated Upas … is a native of Java. The juice … was formerly used by the natives to poison their arrows.
attrib. 1857. Miller, Elem. Chem., Org., 287. Strychnia … is one of the active constituents of the upas poison.
3. The poison obtained from the upas-tree.
1783. London Mag., 515/2. To suffer death by a lancet poisoned with Upas. Ibid., 516/1. I … procured … some grains of Upas.
1814. T. Horsfield, in Thomson’s Ann. Philos., IX. 207. One of the experiments … was made with the oopas prepared by myself.
1830. Lindley, Nat. Syst. Bot., 95. An order [of plants] which contains the most deadly poison in the world, the Upas of Java.
1860. Mayne, Expos. Lex., s.v.
