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THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. [December 23,1871. 
tain herbs were called, and for what complaints they 
were reputed to be a remedy. I found none of the herb 
vendors so well up in the business as to know the bota¬ 
nical name of any one article that they sold, and many 
of the English names were such as have not been heard 
out of Lancashire lately. When any plantsman looks 
over the stock, and sees deadly poisons sold by the 
handful or even armful, and never by weight or mea¬ 
sure, and with no reliable instructions as to the dose for 
an adult or for a child, the whole thing appears quite 
alarming. The business of the apothecary is regulated 
by law, and he qualifies for it; but the herbalist dis¬ 
penses medicine in open market to all comers with im- 
punity. I would not be severe upon the kindly old lady 
who sits by her herbs and roots all day long, and every 
market day, giving advice free, and charging very little 
for the medicinal herbs; but who can tell what fearful 
effects may be produced where excessive doses are given, 
and there is no duly qualified person ever called in to 
see the results ? I have eaten the tubers of wake-robin 
{Anon inoculation), and know it to be an excellent vege¬ 
table, the tubers being beautifully white when boiled; 
but if I had eaten as much as the size of a bean of the 
same roots in a raw state I should have been poisoned. 
The whole secret of the Arum tubers is that the acrid 
principle is volatile, and goes off in boiling. In Thorn¬ 
ton’s ‘ Herbal,’ above referred to, he speaks of doses of 
fresh Arum tubers of 10 grains taken inwardly, and that 
this very small dose (the 48th part of an ounce) makes 
the patient sweat. What a subject this fiery root would 
be for the herbalist to sell when fresh, while when dried 
or boiled it would bo no better than a chip in porridge. 
But strangers should come to Manchester at Whit¬ 
suntide to see the trade in nettles. Of this plant it has 
been said that it has dogged the footsteps of man every¬ 
where to hang him, as it contains a strong fibre fit to 
make ropes of; but here it is made into beer, the liquor 
being sold at \d. a bottle. When the scholars return 
from their yearly excursion to the country they come 
home laden with nettles; and were it not that every 
hair on the nettle is a poisoned sting, the plant would 
have become extinct long ago,—at least within thirty 
miles of Manchester. I have eaten the fresh nettle 
sprouts in spring, gathered before they got to be longer 
than one’s finger, and they were very good plain boiled. 
If this practice were more common, it would lessen the 
crops of nettles, and turn this unhandsome plant to 
some good account. The public have nothing to fear 
from the herbalist making any mistakes in dispensing- 
nettles. The plant has a character; there is nothing 
mawkish about it, and it needs very little logic to ex¬ 
plain to the dullest comprehension that it will excite 
(Dr. Thornton agrees with this); indeed, I have seen 
lads dance with pain and without music when taking 
their first lessons on the nature and properties of a 
bunch of nettles. The dulness of the ass, the thickness 
of his hide, and the power of his jaw-bones, are all 
proved by the fact that he can eat nettles, green or 
dried, with impunity. 
A lady lectured at Birmingham the other day on the 
education of women in the arts and sciences. Surely 
the botanical department of the “Materia Medica” 
would be a lady-like business, as there are already many 
ladies who are good authorities on our native flowering 
plants and ferns; and if the subject once got into a 
girl’s school the pupils would collect the specimens, and 
when these were correctly named and described the 
girls would ever after know the plants by name, and be 
able to turn them to account. Reliable information on 
the nature and properties of culinary and medicinal 
herbs might from time to time be given in the columns 
of your valuable paper. Large sums of money are paid 
to herb-gatherers, and men may be seen fishing for the 
fleshy stems of water lilies [Nymphceas and Nuphars ) 
and the bog hop, alias buckbean, alias water trefoil 
([Menyanthes trifoliata ), and women employ themselves 
profitably by gathering wood sage (Teucrium Scorn- 
donia), mug wort (Artemisia vulgaris ) and horehound 
(Marrubium vulgare ); and as these parties pay no rent 
for the land on which the herbs grow, it is by no means 
an unprofitable speculation. 
There is a large field open for useful service in col¬ 
lecting, drying and preserving herbs. The herb teas 
are examples of leaves properly dried and preserved in 
canisters for use. 
It may not be always easy to draw a hard and fast 
line between the duties of the housewife and those of 
the herbalist, for we read of the Scottish lady of rank 
superintending the manipulation of elder-flowers when 
she was asked in marriage to the Laird of Cockpen,— 
“ Lady Jane she was making the elder-flower wine;” 
and Solomon’s ideal of a household matron, a priceless 
treasure, is made to consist of a lady that looketh well 
to the ways of her household,—a worker,—or, as the 
sacred penman has it, one that eateth not the bread of 
idleness. Such an one would soon know plants by 
sight, and how to manage them. 
NOTE ON THE DIGESTION OF MINERAL 
SUBSTANCES.* 
BY RICHARD V. TUSOX, F.C.S. 
Trofessor of Chemistry in the Royal Veterinary College. 
Physiologists and chemists have hitherto entertained 
the belief that the principal, if not the sole function of 
the pepsin and acid contained in the gastric juice is to- 
render soluble the albuminoid constituents of food, and 
thus prepare them for the subsequent process of ab¬ 
sorption. 
Conceiving, however, that it would be extremely in¬ 
teresting to study the effect, if any, of the solvent con¬ 
stituents of the gastric juice upon mineral substances, 
especially those employed as medicines, I have set my¬ 
self the task of investigating this subject. The inquiry 
is yet but in its infancy; nevertheless the results already 
obtained are sufficiently positive and striking to induce 
me to “ claim date” by placing on record the following 
experiments:— 
Experiment 1.—A mixture of calomelf and distilled 
water containing 2 per cent, of hydrochloric acid. 
Experiment 2.—A mixture of calomel, pepsin, J and 
distilled water. 
Experiment 3.—A mixture of calomel, pepsin, and 
distilled water, containing 2 per cent, of hydro¬ 
chloric acid. 
Those mixtures were placed in glass vessels, and kept 
at 38° C. (100-2° F.), i. e. at about the temperature of the 
body, for twenty-four hours, during which time they 
were occasionally stirred or shaken. They -were then 
thrown on to filters of Swedish paper, and the filtrates 
saturated with sulphuretted hydrogen. The filtrates from 
Experiments 1 and 2 remained unaltered. The filtrate 
from Experiment 3 yielded a precipitate of sulphide of 
mercury. 
The results of these experiments therefore show that 
neither dilute hydrochloric acid (2 per cent.) nor pepsin 
alone is capable of dissolving calomel, but that -when 
these agents are mixed they do effect its solution, and, 
consequently, that the digestion of calomel, so far as its- 
solution in artificial gastric juice is concerned, is brought 
about under the same conditions as that of the albumi¬ 
noids. 
The importance of this observation will become appa- 
* Reprinted from the Lancet. 
f The calomel employed in all the experiments was pre¬ 
viously tested as to its purity. 
X Pepsina porci, prepared by Messrs. Bullock and Rey¬ 
nolds. 
