Medicinal Herbs.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 866, 5 October 1888, Page 4

Medicinal Herbs.

The indigenous plauts of Great Britain are too much neglected in the present age, for persons are apt to run after all that is rare or novel in the form of medicine in preference to cultivating our native herbs, so many of which are rich in curative properties. The Balm and the Dandelion, for instance, are little valued, yet the first is an admirable tonic, and the other a first rate liver medicine. The Balm is, strictly speaking, a native of the South of Europe, but it has been grown in our gardens from time immemorial, aßd the first record I can discover of its being used medicinally rests with the Arabs, who are raid to have taken it to strengthen the nerves ; but I can remember the time when balm tea was drank by the labouiing classes in South Wales almost as freely as tea is now taken by English cottagers, and most certainly hysteria was at that period a disease unknown amongst the working classes. Not so now, alas! Dandelion is admitted into our British Pharmacopoeia under the name of Taraxacum, and regularly prescribed in diseases of the liver and spleen ; but the poor people were at oue time accustomed to make a decoction with the roots, which answered nearly as well as the chemically prepared extract, and the leaves when blanohed are taken by the French in Balads. It is likewise a valuable anti-scor-butic. People put great faith in the doctrine of signatures during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it is now nearly exploded. It was based upon the following principles, that every natural production indicates by some obvious or external mark the diseases in - which it is efficacious ; and for my own part I really believe that there is a great deal of truth in the idea that not only the colours of a flower, but various other marks on leaves, stems, or roots, are typical of their medicinal properties ; for example, the spotted Lungwort possesses healing powers in consumption, the scarlet poppy has been used with good effect in erysipelas, and the Asarabacca, provincially called tho Foal’s foot or wild ginger, with its curious ear.shaped leaf, was formerly an unfailing remedy for all the pains that affeot that organ.—Science Monthly.