NATIVE MEDICINAL PLANTS OF QUEENSLAND 



By JOSEPH LAUTERER, M.D. 



I' -A. 12, T I. 



l^Read before the Royal Society of Queensland, 15th June, 1894.] 



If we read the reports of the unlucky fate of the Austrahan 

 explorers Burke and Wills, who died in 1861 from starvation 

 near Cooper's Creek, in a place where at that time a large tribe 

 of aboriginals lived, and where to-day the German Missionary 

 Station, Bethesda, is prospering, we certainly wonder why those 

 highly educated people belonging to superior race were so far 

 behind their black brothers in the struggle for life, and we can 

 see in their instance the great value of experience and of a good 

 knowledge of a country and its natural products. Quite a 

 similar flight of thoughts found many times its way to my soul 

 when in New South Wales. I had to go far away to a patient 

 on the Lachlan or Macquarie, and when I found him dying, or 

 half dead in his slabhouse, on the threshold of which I saw the 

 very plant growing which could have saved him. This, our 

 country of Eucalypts and Epacridea? where God Jupiter (as 

 Horace has it) gives us a long spring and a mild winter, and 

 where we need not envy the wine-god for the lustily growing 

 grape — this our sunshiny country is one of the most healthy 

 spots on the face of the earth in spite of the contrary assertions 

 of inexperienced scribblers. Many of the diseases of the old 

 world are totally absent here, or are of a much milder character, 

 a fact which will be acknowledged by every medical man who 

 has had occasion to practise for a series of years in both parts 

 of the world. In central and eastern Europe we have from the 

 end of December up to the middle of April widely spreading 



