i34 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY* 
and I found that it contained quite a large proportion of Poke root 
{Phytolacca decandra), which possesses violently emetic and purgative 
properties. Tracing the root to its source, I learned that it came 
from Trieste, but as the root is an American drug, why it should have 
come from Austria remained a puzzle until, some years subsequently, 
when the Hungarian Exhibition took place in London, a Hungarian 
Professor of Materia Medica informed me that the plant had been 
grown in Bosnia for many years past for the sale of the berries, which 
were employed to colour wines, but that a more satisfactory berry, 
imported from Chile, known as Macqui (Aristotelia Macqui, Fam. 
Tiliaceae), has superseded it, and as the leaves of the Bosnian plant 
resembled those of Belladonna in shape and size, and the root 
resembled that of Belladonna in colour, the roots were got rid of 
by mixing them with Belladonna root, and the dried leaves with those 
of Belladonna leaves. Instances could be multiplied showing the 
danger of allowing cheap European drugs to compete with those 
obtainable in this country. In the United States there is a Govern- 
ment Inspector of Drugs, but the medical profession in this country 
has no such protection against the importation of inferior and 
adulterated medicinal plants. 
No country, as a rule, exports its best products, but keeps them 
for home consumption, unless the price offered is a sufficient induce- 
ment to do otherwise. Even India does not send to England the best 
quality of Indian hemp, but the product of the previous year, which 
is less active than that of the current year. Germany and Austria 
follow the usual rule, and send abroad their surplus produce at the 
cheapest possible rate. 
The purity and good quality of medicinal plants are of the greatest 
importance from a medical point of view, and any inequality in the 
strength of important and highly active medicines is sure, in the long 
run, to discourage the use by medical practitioners of those particular 
medicines. It is to avoid variation in the strength of preparations 
made from medicinal plants that the Pharmacopoeia is issued by the 
General Medical Council; but unfortunately the compilers of the 
Pharmacopoeia do not, as a rule, inform themselves of the commercial 
difficulties connected with the medicinal plants industry. Thus 
a few years ago some careful scientific experimentalists found that 
different commercial samples of the active principles of Aconite varied 
so considerably in strength that one sample was seventy times stronger 
than another, or in other words that the dose of a medicine made 
from one would be equal to seventy doses made from the other. This 
was due to the use of roots of wild Aconite imported from Germany. 
As there are about twenty-four wild varieties of Aconitum Napellus, 
and all are not known to be equally active, and the roots are gathered 
indiscriminately so long as the plants have a blue flower, it is obvious 
that roots obtained from a definite cultivated variety are better than 
those of wild plants. But the use of the cheaper German root, which 
is almost always of a mixed character, has led, in the case of this very 
