SOME HEALING PLANTS 129 



colds, Nature offers him, in addition to the plants 

 already mentioned, the choice of a tea of fragrant 

 elderberry blossoms; a decoction of horehound, 

 which, by the way, is only an immigrant in our 

 State; a tincture of sunflower, which is also adopted 

 as an official drug for asthma, throat diseases and 

 influenza; or an extract of wild peony, which will 

 also allay dyspepsia. 



If he be the victim of catarrh, he can lie on a 

 pillow of the common everlasting; make a tea from 

 the covering of the root of the mountain birch; or, 

 if he be south of Santa Barbara, use a snuff of dried 

 wooly blue curls. This flower was called romero, 

 or rosemary, by the Spanish Californians, and by 

 that name it is used in formal medicine. Fried in 

 oil, it was used as an ointment for ulcers, and it is a 

 valuable liniment for all muscular troubles. 



If he succumbs to fever, he can make a tea of the 

 button bush, which is also a good laxative, a tonic, 

 and a cough cure; or a tea of the blue-eyed grass, 

 which will sustain a patient several days without 

 other food; or an infusion of bedstraw, whose name 

 was earned by one of the species filling the Manger 

 at Bethlehem. 



If he suffers from rheumatism, there is the dog- 

 bane, the root of the skunk cabbage, which is also 

 made into a salve for ringworm and white swelling; 

 the white-veined shin leaf, whose name is borrowed 



