A 



SUPPLEMENT, 



4-c. 



r 



I. VEGETABLES. 



Vegetables form in every country the greatest number of 

 remedies employed by practitioners in medicine : not being so 

 remote, in respect to their chemical composition, from the solids 

 and fluids of the human body, as to refuse to assimilate with them; 

 and yet sufficiently so, as to have, in general, a decidedly marked 

 action upon them. 



The number of vegetables which are possessed of medicinal vir- 

 tues, and which are sold in the shops of druggists and herbalists, 

 or used by private practitioners, being so great, it is absolutely 

 necessary to adopt some mode of arrangement. Of the two 

 methods now in common use, that of Jussieu, as amended by the 

 Vilest writers, is here followed, as being more conformable to 

 . ature than the sexual system of Linna?us. The preference thus 

 given to a natural system is also justifiable on the ground that 

 most of the orders have some common medicinal qualities, which 

 re the more distinctly marked, as the order itself is more distinct 

 irom others in its botanical characters. 



The plants are designated by their common English names, 

 :!C officinal Latin names by which they arc known throughout 

 i urope, and finally, by those given them by Linnaius and his 

 illowers, when they differ from those last mentioned, in order 

 iliat references may be made with facility to the works of the old 

 botanists, who were particularly studious of the medicinal uses of 

 plants. 



The plants included in this synopsis arc not only those men- 

 tioned in the several successive Pharmacopoeias of the College of 

 Physicians, and in the two provincial Pharmacopoeias of Dublin 

 and Edinburgh, but also most of the plants which have ever been 

 described as possessing any medicinal virtues or used in the chemi- 

 cal arts. 



Boots are best taken up in the beginning of spring, unless 



