PREFACE. 



In executing his task he has been much embarrassed to 

 determine within what limits to confine it. To be guided 

 by the last edition of the London Pharmacopoeia, or by 

 any other work of the same description, would have mani- 

 festly been inexpedient, because all such books are from 

 their very nature circumscribed, and confined in their 

 application to some particular place. To have thus limited 

 the present work, would have entirely defeated one of the 

 first objects set before himself by the author in the exe- 

 cution of it the indication of what remedial agents are 

 employed in other countries, but not yet introduced into 

 English practice. No one will be bold enough to assert 

 that the physician already possesses the most powerful 

 agents produced by the vegetable kingdom ; for every year 

 is bringing some new plant into notice for its energy, 

 while others are excluded because of their inertness. In 

 tropical countries, where a fervid sun, a humid air, and 

 a teeming soil give extraordinary energy to vegetable 

 life, the natives of those regions often recognise the 

 existence of potent herbs unknown to the European prac- 

 titioner. No doubt such virtues are often as fabulous, and 

 imaginary, as those of indigenous plants long since rejected 

 by the sagacity of European practice. But we are not 

 altogether to despise the experience of nations less ad- 

 vanced in knowledge than ourselves, or to suppose because 

 they may ascribe imaginary virtues to some of their officinal 

 substances, as has been abundantly done by ourselves in 

 former days, that therefore the remedial properties of their 

 plants are not worth a serious investigation ; or that their 

 medical knowledge is beneath our notice because they are 

 unacquainted with the terms of modern science. It is not 

 much above twenty years since an English officer in India 

 was cured of gonorrhoea by his native servant, after the 

 skill of regular European practitioners had been exhausted: 

 the remedy employed was Cubebs, the importance of which 

 was previously unknown, and the rationale of whose action 

 is to this day beyond the discovery of physiologists. It 

 is of undoubted value in urethral catarrh : and who shall 

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