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PHARMACOPCEIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS.

it has always been employed. Theophrastus (633) three Centimesbefore Christ, described it and located its origin. Dioscorides, a Greekwriter, and Arabian writers gave it due attention. In fact, it wouldperhaps be as difficult to locate the first use of wheat as the first useof Tragacanth.

However, until a moderately recent period, only the knotty yellowor brown natural exudation was found in commerce. The nativeslearned next that by cleaning the bases of the bushes, incising the barkwith a knife, ribbons of a pure white or semi-transparent nature couldbe produced. This is now the favorite form.

Tragacanth comes into Smyrna from the inferior of Asia Minor,and from Persia and Armenia. Professor T. H. Norton described tous its collection about Harput, Turkey. Tragacanth of commerce isa conglomerate mixture, good, bad, indifferent, as obtained from thecaravans. In Smyrna it is sorted into grades, based mainly on thecolor. This writer took much interest in the Tragacanth problem, andmade many photographs of the Smyrna warehouses, where girls(Jewish) were engaged in sorting Tragacanth and nugtalls. Dealersin the one handle the other.

TRITICUM

Couch grass, Agropyron repens, is a weed widely diffusedthroughout Europe, Northern Asia, the Caspian region, North andSouth America, even to Patagonia and Terra del Fuega. The ancientswere naturally familiär with this grass with a creeping root-stalk, butit is impossible to determine the species valued by them. Dioscorides(194) ascribes to the decoction a value in calculus and suppression ofurine. This use of triticum is corroborated by Pliny (514), and againoccurs in the writings of Oribasius (479a) of the third Century.Practically all the mediasval herbals figure the plant as in Dodonaeus(195). As a domestic remedy triticum has ever been in common use,and is still, in the form of a decoction, much employed in mucous dis-charges from the bladder and in other affections of the urinary organs.

ULMUS

"Slippery elm," Ulmus fulva, is a middle-sized tree found abun-dantly in the natural woodlands of the Central and Eastern UnitedStates, from Canada to the South. The Indians and settlers ofNorth America valued the inner bark of this tree as a poultice; incertain skin diseases they used it as an external application, and as asoothing drink in fevers. In bowel : affections they employed a colddecoction. Schöpf (582), 1787, refers to it as "salve bark." An in-fusion made by digesting the shredded inner bark of slippery elm incold water, has (after the teaching of the Indians) ever maintained ahigh reputation in domestic North American medication in fevers, andespecially in diarrheas connected therewith. The mucilaginous quali-ties render the powdered bark peculiarly adapted to the making ofpoultices, in which direction it was known to all the early settlers ofAmerica and was by them introduced to the medical profession.