312 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
Mulberries. “Alice” (in Through the Looking Glass) “found 
herself singing the old catch of children as they dance round, 
hand-in-hand, in a circle, ‘ Here we go round the Mulberry bush,’ 
which certainly was funny.” 
The Bilberry, Whortleberry, Trackleberry, Blackheart, or 
Whinberry, grows abundantly in our heathy, and mountainous 
districts, as a small, branched shrub bearing globular wax-like 
flowers, and black berries, which are covered when quite fresh 
with a grey bloom. The Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) is a 
capital astringent, and from it can be made a useful domestic 
cordial as such. If some good brandy be poured over two 
handfuls of the bruised fruit in a bottle, this will form an extract 
which will continually improve by being kept. Obstinate 
diarrhoea may be remedied by giving doses of a tablespoonful 
of such extract, with a wineglassful of warm water, every 
two hours whilst needed, even for severe dysenteric diarrhcea. 
The berries contain chemically much tannin. An extract of 
Bilberries, when brushed on skin surfaces affected by eczema, 
and other such diseased conditions, being afterwards covered 
over with cotton-wool, will signally relieve. Bilberry pudding 
is one of the things to be commended for consumptive, or 
scrofulous patients. Together with the Bilberries, some of the 
moorland air from whence they come seems to be also swallowed ; 
and perhaps reminiscences arise of the sweet fresh breeze, and 
the short, pleasant grass of the Bilberry hills, and then it’s 
“Oh, who would o’er the downs so free?” Why, the con- 
sumptive, and delicate people, to be sure! “Make a crust as 
light as you can ; grease a basin, and line it with the crust ; half 
fill it with well-picked Bilberries ;_ strew two tablespoontuls of 
sugar over them, and continue to fill in fruit until the basin is 
well filled up, and heaped ; next put on the crust, flour a cloth, 
tie it over, and boil for two hours.” The Irish call them 
“ Frawms.” Lowell, in Fireside Travels, tells that the greater 
part of what is now Cambridge Port, U.S.A., was at one time 
a “Huckleberry pasture.” As already notified, against the 
intestinal bacilli of typhoid fever the fruit of the Bilberry shrub 
affords a specific remedy, because the small, sweet, blackish, 
purple berries are highly antifermentative, freeing the stools from 
putridity, and the bowels from flatulence. It has been shown 
experimentally that the typhoid bacillus becomes destroyed 
by Bilberry juice, and prevented from recurrent growth, 
