PHARMACOPCEIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS.

days, and the waiter asked a Kentuckian at my side who ordered tea,"what kind of tea" he wanted. "Store tea," he answered, "I kin gitpleanty of Sassafras at home."

It is not customary for Sassafras drinkers to keep the root-barkseparated from the root, the recently dug roots being shaved as the barkwas used. Kentuckians claim that there are two varieties of Sassafras,the red Sassafras and the white, distinguished only by the bark. Thewhite Sassafras is not so aromatic and is bitter to the taste, and theyuse only the red bark.

In addition to the wood, root and bark, mucilage of the pith isemployed in domestic mediane to bathe inflamed eyes. I find a com-plete description of the domestic uses of Sassafras in Rafinesque'sMedical Flora, 1830, which for various reasons I feel called upon toreproduce as an ending to this record of Sassafras.

Found from Canada to Mexico and Brazil. Roots, bark, leaves, flowers,fragrant and spicy. Flavor and smell peculiar, similar to fennel, sweetish sub-acrid, residing in a volatile oil heavier than water. The sassafrine, a peculiarmucus unalterable by alcohol, found chiefly in the twigs and pith, thickenswater, very mild and lubricating, very useful in opthalmia, dysentery, gravel,catarrh, etc. Wood yellow, hard, durable, soon loses the smell; the roots chieflyexported for use as stimulant, antispasmodic, sudorific, and depurative; the oilnow often substituted; both useful in rheumatism, cutaneous diseases, secondarySyphilis, typhus fevers, etc. Once used in dropsy. The Indians use a strongdecoction to purge and clean the body in the spring; we use instead the tea ofthe blossoms for a vernal purification of the blood. The powder of the leavesused to make glutinous gombos. Leaves and buds used to flavor some beers andspirits. Also deemed vulnerary and resolvent chewed and applied, or mena-gogue and corroborant for women in tea; useful in scurvy, cachexy, flatulence,etc. Bowls and cups made of the wood, when fresh, it drives bugs and moths.The bark dyes wood of a fine orange color called "shikih" by Missouri tribes,and smoked like tobacco.

SCAMMONIUM

The dried juice of scammony (Convolvulus scammonia) hasbeen used in domestic medicine from ancient times. Theophrastus(633). 3°° B- C, mentions it, as well as did Dioscorides (194), Pliny(514), Celsus (136), and Rufus of Ephesus (561a), a city in whoseneighborhood scammony abounded, as is yet the case near its ruins.The early Arabians were acquainted with the plant, and in the tenthand eleventh centuries it was used in Britain, being commended toAlfred the Great by Helias, Patriarch of Jerusalem. Botanists of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Brunfels (107), Gesner (264),and others, described the plant as well as the drug obtained therefrom,the latter being well described by Russell (566), an English physicianof Aleppo, in 1752.

Scammony is obtained from Asia Minor, near Smyrna, which isits principal port of export. The resin of scammony, in the form ofa dried juice, was gathered by means of sea shells, within which thejuice collected and dried, a method of obtaining it still practiced inAsia Minor. Mr. Clark, of Sochia, near Smyrna, obtained the resinas an alcoholic extract from the dried root, a method of production

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