196 LEGUMINOS^ 



in Scotland. It would, however, immediately attract the notice of anyone 

 at all observant of wild flowers, by its large leaf, so much larger than any 

 of our native vetches. The author can remember, that when she first met 

 with this plant in a green lane, near Higham, in Kent, she thought that 

 these leaves must be those of a young shoot of the garden Bobinia, False 

 Acacia, as it is commonly called, which had sprung up from seeds brought 

 from some neighbouring garden. Both in form and colour they resemble 

 such a shoot, but their large stipules, free from each other, and from the 

 leaf -stalk, form a marked feature of this leaf, and in more fully -grown speci- 

 mens of the Milk-vetch, the prostrate stems, sometimes two or three feet 

 long, and the dull yellow flowers, render this plant easy of distinction from 

 all others. The legumes are sometimes an inch and a half long, and are 

 curved in the form of a sickle. 



This plant is called Sweet Milk-vetch, from the sweetness of its leaves and 

 roots, which are on the first taste pleasant, but leave a bitter and disagreeable 

 flavour on the tongue. This causes them to be disliked by cattle, and they 

 are left quite untouched when occurring among the pasture. AVere it not 

 for this, the plant would doubtless have been cultivated, yielding, as it does 

 by its large leaves, so great an amount of herbage. Several species of 

 Astragalus, in other lands, have the sweet flavour without the succeeding 

 bitterness. Thus the roots of Astragalus aboriginorwn are long and yellow, 

 like liquorice roots, and in Arctic Amei^ica, where it grows wild, it is collected 

 as an article of food by the Crees and Sioux Indians. The roots of another 

 species. Astragalus ammodyfes, which is also sweet, are used in Siberia instead 

 of liquorice. 



We have but three native species of Astragalus, neither of which is 

 sufficiently important to form a feature in our landscape. There are vast 

 tracts, howevei", in other countries, of which the difl!"erent species form the 

 chief feature. Mount Etna, celebrated by the ancients for its odoriferous 

 productions, and said by Plutarch to emit so strong a scent from its varied 

 flowers, that the hunter was overcome by their fragrance, has thick half- 

 globular mounds in great abundance, formed by the growth of a species of 

 Milk-vetch. The Astragalus sicvlus is the predominant plant amid its varied 

 vesretation, and these singular mounds are sometimes five feet in diameter 

 and two and a half in height, this thick and dwarfed mode of growth 

 resembling that of several plants found in the Alpine regions of the 

 Cordilleras. On the open plains of the Asiatic steppes, however, they attain 

 considerable height. Baron Humboldt remarked of some of these steppes, 

 in the temperate zone, that they were full of flowering herbaceous plants, 

 especially of a papilionaceous kind, in which hosts of species of Astragalus 

 immediately attracted the attention. 



Our Sweet Milk-vetch is the largest of the British species, but our gardens 

 exhibit some very pretty shrubby kinds. The seeds of several of the foreign 

 species are roasted and used as coffee, but this cannot at all rival, either in 

 flavour or in refreshing properties, the produce of the Arabian berry. Gum 

 Tragacanth is also yielded by some kinds of Astragalus ; and its power to 

 render water viscid is about twenty -four times as great as that of the Gum 

 Arabic. Several of these plants are used medicinally. 



