2 
■INTRODUCTION TO BOTANY. 
But these commercial ideas have less force in the country. 
There the practitioner has more time on his hands ; in his 
rounds to visit his patients, he can collect the herbs pro- 
fusely scattered in his path, and although his education at 
the hospitals in town naturally influences him in his choice, 
yet if prudence has any share in his character, he must be 
struck with the impropriety of neglecting the resources 
freely offered by nature to his possession for purchased ones. 
It is a favourite axiom with botanical physicians that where 
nature produces diseases, there she also produces the reme- 
dies for them, and they adduce in proof of this dogma, the 
growth of scurvy grass, and other antiscorbutic plants in 
those cold climates where scurvy reigns as an epidemic ; of 
pepper and other spices in hot countries where the stomach 
is liable to torpor, and requires an extraordinary stimulus to 
promote its healthy action ; as also of calamus aromaticus 
in those humid situations which are liable to intermittent 
fevers; and of sarsaparilla and guiacum in the regions, sup- 
posed to be the native seats of the venereal lues, and where, 
according to a Spanish traveller, d’ Aranda, in his account 
of South America, it is a sporadic disease. Without abso- 
lutely professing a dogma, which has much appearance of 
truth in it, there can be no doubt but that the remedies ne- 
cessary for most of the diseases that afflict human nature 
may be found at the country practitioner’s own door, or 
very near at hand. That he may be enabled however to 
make use of them, it is necessary he should know them well, 
the more especially as many plants are so much alike, that 
it requires attention directed to proper characteristics to 
distinguish them. Now botany is that science which enables 
us to distinguish plants from one another, to assign to them 
their proper names, and to declare their several uses ; 
without which last part, although too often neglected by 
the general botanist, it would be a barren study. 
Another part of medicine, in which the use of botany 
is evident, too frequently happens, in consequence of the 
similitude of plants to one another, so that those ignorant 
of the means of distinguishing them are led to use a plant 
of such powerful action on the human frame as to kill, or 
very violently affect, the unfortunate person who has mis- 
taken it for some nutrimental vegetable, especially foreign- 
ers, who use a greater variety of vegetables than ourselves. 
Yet even among us, the instances are not rare in which 
hemlock has been mistaken for parsley, the roots of wild 
