MEDICINAL AND POISONOUS PLANTS. 
CHAPTER I. 
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 
1. Introduction. -The United States pays about eighteen million 
dollars annually for imported vegetable drugs. Some of these are from 
tropical countries and can not be grown within the bounds of our 
native country, but the majority of plants used in medicine, which have 
been imported heretofore, might readily be cultivated in the United 
States. Furthermore, there is a steadily increasing shortage of wild- 
growing, native, medicinal plants. Sooner or later these must be culti- 
vated to prevent extermination or paucity. It is also a fact that the 
foreign supply of vegetable drugs is extremely uncertain and variable, 
both as to quality and quantity, conditions which can be corrected by 
growing drugs of first quality at home. 
That medicinal plants may be grown profitably has been proven by 
the several isolated attempts in widely-separated areas of the United 
States. The following suggestions are intended to serve as stimulus, 
as well as a guide, to those interested in the cultivation of medicinal 
plants, primarily in California, also in other states. 
Within recent years the pharmaceutical press has published reports 
on the scarcity of certain drugs, as belladonna, hyoscyamus, hydrastis, 
senega, and others. Some anxiety begins to arise concerning the future 
supply of cascara bark. 
The present tendency in medical and pharmaceutical botany is toward 
greater simplification. The number and variety of plants now used 
medicinally is very small when compared with the number used in the 
past, and the process of “weeding out” is still going on, as is shown by 
the fact that in the eighth decennial revision of the United States Phar- 
macopoeia about forty crude vegetable drugs were excluded, while only 
three or four new ones were admitted. This process of reducing the 
number of vegetable drugs does not, however, imply that the importance 
of studying new and old medicinal plants is correspondingly lessened. 
Rather the reverse is true. Botanists, chemists, physiologists, and phar- 
macologists must extend their investigations into fields still unknown or 
imperfectly understood. There is, for example, much uncertainty as to 
the identity, origin, and physiological action of many long-used vege- 
