STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 
various manufactures. With it they dye the porcupine 
quills and moose-hair both red and orange, and also stain 
the baskets of a better sort that they offer for sale in the 
stores. Nor is this the only use to which it is applied: 
they use the juice both externally in curing cutaneous 
eruptions of the skin, and internally in other diseases. 
Latterly its medicinal qualities have been acknowledged by 
the American Eclectic School of Pharmacy as valuable in 
many forms of disease, so that we find our beautiful plant 
to be both useful and ornamental. 
The Blood-root grows in large beds; each knob of the 
root sends up one leaf and its accompanying flower bud, 
which it kindly enfolds as if to protect the fair, frail 
blossom from the chilling winds and showers of hail and 
sleet. The leaf is of a grayish or bluish green; at first the 
underside, which is the part exposed to view, is salmon 
colored veined with red, but as it expands and enlarges the 
outer surface darkens into deeper green. The blossom is 
composed of many petals, varying from eight to twelve.* 
The many stamens are of a bright orange yellow. The 
stigma is two-lobed, and the style short or sessile. The 
seed is contained in an oblong pod of two valves. The 
seeds are of a bright red brown color. The ivory white 
petals are oblong, blunt, or sometimes pointed; the outer 
ones larger than the inner, at first concave, but opening 
out as the flower matures. Under cultivation the blossom 
of the Blood-root increases in size, but the plant does not 
*Very rarely more than eight. Itmight becalledan Easter flower. The twosepals fall 
off as the flower opens; owing to this fact few know there were any. The flower 
is composed of four large petals on the outside and four smaller ones inside, both form- 
ing, when separated, a perfect St. Andrew’s Cross. I never saw this noticed by anyone 
but myself. It is so fragile a plant that it is often hard to get a perfect flower, as the 
petals drop when it is being plucked.—A. D.C. 
12 
