114 ROCHESTER ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. [ Dec. 8, 
The method of manufacturing bread from roots was very simple. 
After the roots had been thoroughly dried and pulverized the flour 
was seasoned, mixed with a little animal or fish fat, moistened, worked 
into a pastry dough and patted into the form of a cake or loaf, which 
was placed on a piece of bark or flat stone turned up on its side close 
to the fire. Occasionally the stone was heated and the cake was thus 
at once baked on both sides. Sometimes the loaf was baked in a 
kettle or placed in the ashes under a cover of hot coals; and the 
individual who objected to eating the mass as it came from the fire 
with its covering of gritty ashes, was considered a person of poor taste 
and quite ill bred. 
There is a question regarding the identification of an Indian bread 
root that is worthy the attention of the botanical section of this Academy. 
In narrating the privations suffered by the whites who settled on the 
Chenango river in 1788, Wilkinson’s Annals of Binghampton says, that 
when their crops of corn failed and festive bruin had devastated their 
pig styes, the starving settlers went to an island in the river, and dug 
quantities of a tall weed termed Anicum, the roots of which they dried 
and ground or pounded into a coarse flour for bread-stuff. 
It is possible that this so-called anicum was a species of the genus 
Panicum or panic grass, the seeds of which the wild Indians of the 
West still use for bread in the same manner white people use wheat ; 
but the writer cannot learn that the seeds of anacum were utilized for 
food. Inquiries.resulted in the description of a plant in many respects 
resembling Psoralea esculenta, commonly known in the western States 
as Indian bread root, prairie turnip, etc. Botanical authorities usually 
report Psoralea esculenta a native of the West and South; but a Seneca 
friend who had visited the Sioux Indians and was familiar with their 
bread root tip-si-u-nah, which plant possesses none of the poisonous 
qualities of arum, positively assured the writer that such a plant once 
grew in New York. A public agitation of the bread root topic last sum- 
mer, was productive of the following letter from General J. S. Clark, the 
distinguished Indianologist and botanist, to Hon. George S. Conover of 
Geneva : 
AuBuRN, N. Y., July 11, 1890. 
| Dear Sir :—You are at liberty to state that Psoralea esculenta has 
been found in New York, in Washington county, many years ago by 
Mr. Frank R. Rathbun, of this city, and fully identified as the genuine 
plant growing in its wild state. A little more inquiry will probably 
establish the fact, that it has been discovered in other localities and may 
