MINT FAMILY. 383 
children to stain their cheeks crimson. The crisp, tender shoots and 
the flowers furnish a rather pleasant, sweet, and aromatic food, and the 
seeds are gathered in large quantities for pinole. After careful win- 
nowing, the seeds are parched either in an ordinary frying pan or 
according to the old custom, which consists in tossing them about with 
hot oak-bark coals. When parched, the taste is much like that of pop- 
corn. The flour, like that from all varieties of pinole seed, is generally 
mixed with that of barley or wheat, and is eaten in the dry condition, 
with the addition of a little salt. Alkanin, the dark-red, amorphous 
dye obtained from Alhanna tinctoria, which is cultivated in southern 
Kurope, is, according to some experiments made by Professors Pam- 
mel and Norton,’ nearly identical with the coloring matter of various 
species of Plagiobothrys and other plants of the Boraginaceae. The 
yieldof color from the plant apparently varies withage. A specimen of 
Plagiobothrys ursinus in the United States National Herbarium, which 
was collected on June 24, 1894, in the Santa Barbara Mountains of 
California, had passed its intense purple dye through three thick sheets 
of specimen paper lying beneath it. 
VERBENACEAE. Vervain Family. 
Verbena hastata L. 
No Indian name was obtained for this plant, which is generally known 
throughout the United States as blue vervain. It is a tall weed-like 
perennial with small rugose leaves and a long densely flowered spike 
of small blue flowers. It grows in the greatest profusion in the 
swampy bottom lands of Round Valley, and furnishes the Concow 
Indians, who alone seem to use the plant, with an abundance of small 
seeds which are used for pinole. 
NEPETACEAE. Mint Family. 
Marrubium vulgare L. 
The common white horehound is well known as a weed along road- 
sides and in dry neglected fields. It is especially abundant at the old 
military headquarters in Round Valley, and is there commonly known 
as ‘‘soldier tea.” It being an introduced plant, the Indians have but 
little knowledge of its value. White people use a decoction of the 
leaves to cure colds, and some of the more educated Indians use it for 
the same purpose and also to check diarrhea. No Indian names were 
given for the plant. 
© 
Micromeria chamissonis (Benth.) Greene. 
Bul-lik'-t6 (Concow).—The pretty little aromatic herbaceous vine, 
synonymously called Jf. douglasi7, which is so well known to Cali- 
fornians under the Spanish name of yerba buena (good herb). It is a 
1Ninth Annual Report of the Missouri Botanical Garden, pp. 149 to 151. 
