Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Upas

UPAS, a Javanese word meaning poison, and specially applied by the Malays and people of western Java to the poison derived from the gum of the anchar tree (Antiaris toxicaria), one of the Artocarpeæ, which was commonly used in Celebes to envenom the bamboo darts of the natives. The name of the upas tree has become famous from the mendacious account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Samarang in 1773) published in the London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in " Loves of the Plants " (Botanic Garden, pt. ii.). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more. The poison was fetched by condemned malefactors, of whom scarcely two out of twenty returned. All this is pure fable, and in good part not even traditional fable, but mere invention.

For a scientific account of the Antiaris, see Horsfield's Plantæ Javanicæ Rariores (1838–52) and Blume's Rumphia (Brussels, 1836), and for the legend Yule, Anglo-Indian Glossary, p. 726 sq.