PHARMACOPCIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS. 
ment was so successful that Frederick the Great purchased the formula 
for an annuity of thirty pounds, conferring on its originator the dignity 
of “Aulic Councillor.” Madame Nuffler, the widow of a surgeon at 
Murten, Switzerland, was paid 18,000 livres by Louis XIV for a tape- 
worm cure consisting chiefly of powdered fern root. J. Peschier 
1825, a pharmacist of Geneva, introduced the ethereal extract, which 
was not, however, employed in England to any extent until the middle 
of the last century. Its empirical “record introduced male fern to the 
orthodox medical profession. 
AURANTII DULCIS ET AMARI CORTEX 
Sweet and Bitter Orange. ‘The orange, (Citrus), was unknown 
to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Arabs, (Gallesio, 255), are 
accepted as having introduced it into Europe, first through Africa, 
Arabia, and Syria, from its original home in Northern India. In that 
country a wild orange still grows, supposedly the parent of the culti- 
vated fruit, be it sweet or bitter. The first specimen to find its way 
into Europe was the bitter orange, cultivated in Rome in A. D. 1200, 
the sweet orange not being introduced until the fifteenth century, when 
it was imported by the Portuguese. The first oranges brought into 
England, seven in number, were imported by a Spanish ship in 1290. 
An Arabian physician of the twelfth century, Avicenna (30), em- 
ployed the juice of the bitter orange in medicine. 
BALSAMUM PERUVIANUM 
This drug, obtained from the Toluifera pereirz, came to the at- 
tention of the earlier Spanish explorers in South America as a sub- 
stance commonly employed by the natives as a remedy for wounds. It 
constituted a part of the tribute paid by the natives to the Indian chiefs 
of Cuscatlan, to whom it was presented in curiously ornamented earthen 
jars.* On its first importation into Europe it brought enormous 
prices, as much as $45 an ounce, and in Rome 100 ducats, or over $200 
an ounce. Pope Pius V permitted the Bishop of the Indies to substi- 
tute this Balsam of Guatemala for that of Egypt in the preparation 
of the chrism used in the Catholic churches. Various early descrip- 
tions of travelers refer to it more or less enthusiastically, between the 
conquest of Guatemala (A. D. 1524), and 1628, at which date Hernan- 
. dez (314) described the tree. From the domestic use of the drug it 
crept into German pharmacy in the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. In consequence of the fact that the exports of Guatemala came 
through the port of Lima, Peru, the misleading name of “Peruvian 
Balsam” was in the early days affixed to it, paralleling somewhat the 
record of Mocha coffee, which is not grown in Mocha or even there- 
about, but was exported therefrom in the early days of Arabian coffee. 
_ * This reminds us of the curious jars in which we observed Mastich sold on the island of 
Scio by the collectors. These jars, holdin re se et meer 
been thus an article of local commerce since 4 since before the Moslem rule. 
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