54 Botanic Drugs 



claims formerly made, especially those making 

 cure-alls of some of them. The day for cure-alls 

 is over. 



Neither the botanist nor the pharmacologist goes 

 very deeply into the intimate composition and 

 physiology of plants, though a literature is devel- 

 oping; 3 but the bacteriologist has done so as regards 

 minute plants; and the students of the larger plants 

 should emulate his example. 



The greatest mystery tale ever written is that of 

 bacteriology the mystery of the minute plant and 

 its influence upon man and the lower animals; but 

 it is a mystery being solved. When the larger 

 plants shall have been studied as deeply as have 

 bacteria and molds, then will plant pharmacology 

 take great prominence as a constructive science. 

 True, we have been breaking alkaloids, oils, and 

 resins out of the larger plants; but what do we 

 know of the intimate relationships of these things 

 in the structure of the plants themselves? Yes, 

 there are unsolved mysteries in plant life, even 

 when used as remedies. When pharmacologists 

 cease to be so much obsessed with alkaloid hunt- 

 ing, and commence the study of the plant remedy 

 as a whole, then will we learn much that we do 

 not know now. As I said before, there is no place 

 for mystery in therapeutics; but to remove certain 

 more or less mysterious elements from therapeutics, 

 the clinician needs to heed pharmacologic teaching 

 more than he has in the past, and the pharmacolo- 

 gist needs to give sincere and unprejudiced study 

 to the things asserted by the empiricist of clinical 

 experience. 



3 See "The Natural History of Plants," Kern and Oliver. 



