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leaves to be eaten in the combination of Mustard and Cress 
with a salad, or with bread and butter. This plant, which grows, 
when uncultivated, on waste ground with large yellow flowers, 
does not afford under any conditions a pungent oil like the black 
Mustard. ‘“ When in the leaf,” John Evelyn tells in his Acetaria, 
“Mustard in young seedling plants is of incomparable effect 
to quicken, and revive the spirits, strengthening the memory, 
expelling heaviness, preventing the vertiginous palsy, and a 
laudable cephalic, besides being an approved anti-scorbutic.” 
The active principle of this white Mustard is sinapin, and the 
seed germinates so rapidly that it has been said a salad of the 
herb may be grown therefrom whilst the joint of meat is being 
roasted for dinner. When swallowed whole in teaspoonful doses 
three or four times a day the seeds will exercise mechanically 
a laxative effect, being voided from the lower bowel without 
undergoing any perceptible change except that their outer skin 
has become a little softened, and mucilaginous. For a relaxed 
sore throat a gargle of bruised Mustard-seed tea proves serviceable. 
Chemically the Nettle (Urtica dioica, and urens), of familiar 
acquaintance all over the country, is so constituted as to provide 
a food available for helping to obviate several bodily ailments, 
and infirmities. It contains formic acid, mucilage, mineral 
salts, ammonia, carbonic acid, and water. A strong infusion 
of the fresh leaves is soothing, and healing as a lotion for burns ; 
the dried leaves, when burnt so as to give off their fumes to be 
inhaled, will relieve bronchial, and asthmatic troubles, ten grains, 
or more, being thus employed at a time. As far back as in the 
year 1400 an entry was made in the churchwarden’s account 
at St. Michael’s, Bath, “ pro urticis venditis ad Laurencium.” 
In 1890 a West End vegetable dealer in London recognized 
the wholesome, and nutritious properties of young Nettle tops 
when cooked for the table, and he arranged for a regular 
supply of the same on finding that a ready sale existed for 
these wares. If Nettle tops are taken as a fresh young 
vegetable in the spring. and early summer, they make a very 
salutary, and succulent dish of greens, which is slightly laxa- 
tive; but during autumn they are hurtful. The true Stinging 
Nettle, with a round, hairy stalk, and which bears only a dull, 
colourless bloom, must be secured, and not a labiate Nettle with 
a square stem. The stinging effect of the true Nettle is caused 
by an acrid secretion contained in minute vesicles at the base 
