PHARMACOPGIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS. 
it has always been employed. Theophrastus (633) three centuries 
before Christ, described it and located its origin. Dioscorides, a Greek 
writer, and Arabian writers gave it due attention. In fact, it would 
perhaps be as difficult to locate the first use of wheat as the first use 
of Tragacanth. 
However, until a moderately recent period, only the knotty yellow 
or brown natural exudation was found in commerce. The natives 
learned next that by cleaning the bases of the bushes, incising the bark 
with a knife, ribbons of a pure white or semi-transparent nature could 
he produced. This is now the favorite form. 
Tragacanth comes into Smyrna from the interior of Asia Minor, 
and from Persia and Armenia. Professor T. H. Norton described to 
us its collection about Harput, Turkey. Tragacanth of commerce is 
a conglomerate mixture, good, bad, indifferent, as obtained from the 
caravans. In Smyrna it is sorted into grades, based mainly on the 
color. This writer took much interest in the Tragacanth problem, and 
made many photographs of the Smyrna warehouses, where girls 
(Jewish) were engaged in sorting Tragacanth and nugtalls. Dealers 
in the one handle the other. 
TRITICUM 
Couch grass, Agropyron repens, is a weed widely diffused 
throughout Europe, Northern Asia, the Caspian region, North and 
South America, even to Patagonia and Terra del Fuega. The ancients 
were naturally familiar with this grass with a creeping root-stalk, but 
it is impossible to determine the species valued by them. Dioscorides 
(194) ascribes to the decoction a value in calculus and suppression of 
urine. This use of triticum is corroborated by Pliny (514), and again 
occurs in the writings of Oribasius (479a) of the third century. 
Practically all the medizval herbals figure the plant as in Dodonzus 
(195). As a domestic remedy triticum has ever been in common use, 
and is still, in the form of a decoction, much employed in mucous dis- 
charges from the bladder and in other affections of the urinary organs. 
ULMUS 
“Slippery elm,” Ulmus fulva, is a middle-sized tree found abun- 
dantly in the natural woodlands of the Central and Eastern United 
States, from Canada to the South. The Indians and settlers of 
- North America valued the inner bark of this tree as a poultice; in 
certain skin diseases they used it as an external application, and as a 
soothing drink in fevers. In bowel affections they employed a cold 
decoction. Schépf (582), 1787, refers to it as “salve bark.” An in- 
fusion made by digesting the shredded inner bark of slippery elm in 
cold water, has (after the teaching of the Indians) ever maintained a 
high reputation in domestic North American medication in fevers, and 
especially in diarrheas connected therewith. The mucilaginous quali- 
ties render the powdered bark peculiarly adapted to the making of 
poultices, in which direction it was known to all the early settlers of 
America and was by them introduced to the medical profession. 
