LETTUCE. 425 
LENTIL (See Bean). 
LETTUCE. 
Our garden Lettuce is.a cultivated variety of the wild, or strongly 
scented Lettuce (Lactuca virosa) which grows with prickly leaves 
on banks and waysides in chalky districts throughout England 
and Wales. This wild Lettuce contains the medicinal properties 
of the plant more actively than does the garden Lettuce, as 
grown for kitchen uses. Chemically, the cultivated Lettuce 
which comes to our tables contains in quite a modified degree 
principles which in the wild plant are narcotic, and dangerous. 
But these principles, lactucin, lactucopicrin, and asparagin, with 
oxalic, malic and citric acids, mannite, albumin, gum, and resin, 
have become as completely toned down, and rendered harmless, 
as were the child-like manners, and the pensive smile of Bret 
Harte’s Heathen Chinee. The Lettuce, or milk plant, was 
esteemed by the early Romans as a sedative for inducing sleep, 
and to be eaten after a debauch of wine. They prepared this 
vegetable with eggs, and served it with the last course at their 
meals, so as to stimulate the appetite afresh. With ourselves, 
the Roman, or Cabbage Lettuce, is the best to “ boil, stew, or 
put into hodge-podge”’; then come different sorts of the Cos 
Lettuce to be eaten raw. When tied up compactly, and thus 
bleached as to its inner leaves, the lettuce remains tender, crisp, 
and succulent, being easily digested, even by dyspeptic persons, 
except as regards the hard stalk. The lettuce contains but little 
nutriment, though supplying some mineral salts, particularly 
nitre. In the stem there still lingers a small amount of the sleep- 
inducing principle, lactucerin, especially when the plant is 
flowering. The Cabbage Lettuce, lactuca sativa vericeps, is slightly 
bitter, because of its milky juice containing the soothing principle 
lactucin. Galen termed the plant ‘‘ philosopher’s, or wise man’s 
herb.” Its condensed juice is named thridax in France, and 
lactucarium in England, when drying into a kind of gum, brown 
like the opium-gum of Poppies, but much milder of effects. Two 
grains of this lactucarium from the garden lettuce may be safely 
given to a young child for soothing it to sleep. Mr. Roker, the 
tough turnkey of the Fleet Prison in which Mr. Pickwick chose 
to be incarcerated for debt, on being asked to point out which 
was the bedstead allotted to that gentleman, denoted a very 
Tusty one in the corner of the room. “It would make one go to 
