5A Professor Burnett’s 
the Andes or the Alps to be sought with avidity, and treated 
with respect. 
It is therefore a matter of no mean importance to which, by 
a resolution of the council, the attention of the scientific world 
at large, of the members of this Society in general, and of m 
colleagues and myself in particular, is directed, by the deter- 
mination to award the silver medal of the present year to the 
author of the best essay on the’ nature and uses of any 
indigenous plants the medicinal powers and properties of 
which have been hitherto unknown, or only imperfectly 
recorded. To me it appears that this will be sinking a shaft 
in a very rich mine of scientific discovery, of truly philoso- 
phical research. I doubt not, that we shall find many of the 
remedies now sought from the tropics and the poles growing 
at our doors, and soliciting to be allowed to relieve our ills. 
It is an amiable idea, and one that experience goes far to 
verify, that wherever natural circumstances favor the pro- 
duction of disease, Nature, i. e. nature’s God, hath benefi- 
cently conjoined the means of cure. May not the late 
experiments with Salicine be given as an apposite illustration? 
For, although we have so long been ploughing the Atlantic, and 
burdening the bosom of the deep, to bring home our harvests 
of Peruvian ague-cure, the ever valuable cinchona, Sa/licine, 
extracted from our native willows, so far as experiments as 
yet have gone, is proved to be equally efficient with the 
Quinine of Peruvian bark. Where do agues most commonly 
prevail? Where do we find remittent and intermittent fevers 
of the greatest frequency and most fatal severity? Where, 
but in wet low lands; in marshy and in fenny districts. And 
where do willows love to dwell? Where, but in those very 
fens and marshes; as if designed to relieve the diseases in- 
separable therefrom. Hence I cannot but regard them as 
the living elaboratories of nature, thus planted by Providence 
to form Salicine for the use of man. 
Of the energies of our native plants the herbalists of a 
former age were doubtless too easily persuaded; their expe- 
rience could have scarcely justified the encomiums they 
lavished upon many; atleast, our observations will not permit 
us to corroborate their praises: but, however ready we may 
be to allow (and no one is more ready than myself,) that the 
curative powers of many plants have been greatly exaggerated, 
and that ignorance and superstition have attributed effects to 
other things than causes, and have often thus ascribed to va- 
rious vegetables, virtues which they have not, and never had; 
still I can hardly think that all their asseverations should be 
based in error; even the greatest lies are generally founded 
