HERBS. 371 
Fifty-six pounds of Lavender will yield exactly one pound of 
the liquid perfume. 
Liquorice, or Licorice, as formerly called, is a plant-product 
familiar to us all, whether by the succus hardened into the 
well-known black stick of Spanish juice, or as made into lozenges, 
or Pontefract tablets, or as the pipe Liquorice of the sweet-stuff 
shops. The Liquorice plant is grown abundantly at Mitcham, 
near London, for supplying our markets, the roots being dug 
up after a three-years’ cultivation. But the search of Diogenes 
for an honest man was scarcely more difficult than would be 
that of an average person for genuine prepared Liquorice ; this 
is because the juice is adulterated to any extent, and there is 
no definite standard of purity for the article now so commonly 
used. Potato starch, millers’ sweepings mixed with sugar,and any 
kind of such rubbish are employed as adulterants. The Chinese 
make much use of the Liquorice root, and its juice, which they 
regard as rejuvenating,,and very nutritious. ‘‘In their drug 
stores,” says the Kew Bulletin (1899), “‘ one can generally obtain 
a panacea for all bodily ills, this varying in the number of its 
ingredients according to the price paid, twenty-five, thirty-five, 
or fifty cents. Such a prescription usually contains a few slices 
of Liquorice root (Glycyrrhiza), with the dried flowers of some 
composite plant, dried cockroaches, dried cockchafers, and the 
skin, with head, and tail, of a lizard stretched on thin sticks. 
An extra five cents will procure a dried sea-horse ; and yet 
another five cents a dried fish of peculiarly narrow shape, and 
about four inches long. All these are boiled together, and the 
decoction drunk as a remedy for heartburn, toothache, cough, 
dimness of sight, and almost any other ailment. The vegetable 
portion of one of these mixtures has been examined at Kew. 
Among the medicaments recognized were the fruit-heads of a 
species of Eriocaulon, which has a reputation in China for curing 
various diseases, such as ophthalmia, nose-bleeding, and some 
affections of the kidneys. Other vegetable ingredients were 
likewise botanically recognized, and identified. Liquorice 1s 
commonly employed as a pectoral in coughs, and hoarseness. 
Chemically the root from which it is obtained affords a special 
sort of sugar, glycyrrhizine, a demulcent starch, asparagin, 
phosphate, and malate of lime, and magnesia, a resinous oil, 
albumin, and woody fibre. The extract is largely imported, 
that described as Solazzi juice being most highly esteemed, . 
