104 . fkfo^nglatrtrs Parities. 



For Btcms and Scalds. 



With -a ftrong decoction of Tobacco they Cure Burns 

 and Scalds, boiling it in Water from a Quart to a Pint, 

 then wafti the Sore therewith, and ftrew on the powder of 

 dryed Tobacco. 



Hollow Leaved Lavender, is a Plant that grows in fait 

 Marlhes overgrown with Mofs, with one ftraight ftalk 

 about the bignefs of an Oat ftraw, better than a Cubit 

 high; upon the top flandeth one [55] fantaftical Flower, 

 the Leaves grow clofe from the root, in fhape like a Tan- 

 kard, hollow, tough, and alwayes full of Water, the 



p. 230; and Winslow's Relation, /. c, p. 253); but our author's text, above, ap- 

 pears- to distinguish the true herb, " not much planted," from " a small kind 

 called pooie," which " the Indians make use of." And again, more clearly, in 

 his Voyages, we have to the same eflfe<5t: "the Indians in New England use a 

 small, round-leafed tobacco, called by them or the fishermen poke. It is odious 

 to the English. ... Of marchantable . . . tobacco, . . . there is little of it 

 planted in New England; neither have they" (both clauses appear to refer to the 

 English) "learned the right way of curing of it." This "marchantable tobacco" 

 was no doubt mainly Nicotiana tabacum, L. ; but the other kind, the weak to- 

 bacco," — cultivated, as Williams tells us, by the Indians, and recognized as 

 tobacco by the English, — was not, as Wood says (N. E. Prospeft, I. c), colt's- 

 foot, but Nicotiana rustica, L. (the yellow henbane of Gerard's Herbal, p. 356), 

 well known to have been long in cultivation among the American savages, and 

 now a naturalized relic of that cultivation in various parts of the United States. 

 The name, poke, or pooie, — if it be, as is supposable, the same with "puck, 

 smoke," of the Narraganset vocabulary of R. Williams (Hist. Coll., vol. v. p. 84), 

 — was perhaps always indefinite, and, since Cutler's day, has been applied in 

 New England to the green hellebore ( Veratrum viride, Ait.) ; but this was not, it 

 is evident, the poke of the first settlers. The name is also given to Phytolacca 

 decandra, L. (the skoke of Cutler), and the hellebore apparently distinguished 

 from this as Indian poke ; but the application of the name to the former, at least, 

 probably had its origin among the whites. 



