botanically arranged. 399 



ingly numerous ; not only furnishing food and medicine for 

 man and beast, materials for agriculture, and various arts and 

 manufactures, and for many of the delights and ornaments of 

 life ; but it supplies important articles of commerce, and, in 

 some countries, is the greatest source of internal wealth. We 

 are, no doubt, yet ignorant of many productions well adapted 

 to most, or all, of those purposes. 



The native Indians were acquainted with the peculiar proper- 

 ties of certain vegetable productions, which if thoroughly un- 

 derstood by the present inhabitants, might be made extensively 

 useful, both in physic, arts and manufactures, and new branches 

 of commerce. Their Tnateria medica seems to have consisted of 

 few articles ; these were certain plants, powerful in their operation, 

 and sometimes producing sudden and surprising effects upon the^ 

 human body. These savages seem to have had better ideas of 

 the medical virtues of plants, than some who have imagined that 

 vegetables, fit only for food, were the most proper for medi- 

 cine ; and that combining a great number of the most com- 

 mon plants, might be a remedy for almost every disease. Vege- 

 tables called poisonous are capable of producing great and sud- 

 den alterations in the human body : May not many of them be 

 found, upon accurate and well-judged experiments, like some 

 chymical poisons, to be the best medicines ? The Indians had 

 discovered effectual antidotes against the venom of rattle-snakes, 

 which must have been a discovery of great importance to them, 

 and may, possibly, be reckoned among their greatest improve- 

 ments in the knowledge of medicine. Mr. Catesby mentions a 

 fact, which he says was well attested, of an Indian's daubing 

 himself with the juice of the purple bindweed, a species of the 

 convolvulus, and then handling a rattle-snake with his naked 

 hands, without receiving any injury. The 



