INDIAN TURNIP. 
II 
pounded, is thrown into clean water and stirred; the water, after 
settling, is poured off, and the white sediment is again submitted 
to the same process until it becomes quite pure, and is then dried. 
A pound of this starch may be made from a peck of the roots. 
The roots should be dried in sand before using. Thus purified and 
divested of its poisonous qualities, the powder so procured becomes 
a pleasant and valuable article of food, and is sold under the name 
of Portland Sago, or Portland Arrow-root. 
When deprived of the poisonous acrid juices that pervade 
them, all our known species may be rendered valuable both as 
food and medicine; but they should not be employed without care 
and experience. The writer remembers, not many years ago, 
several children being poisoned by the leaves of Arum triphyllum 
being gathered and eaten as greens in one of the early-settled 
back townships of Western Canada. The same deplorable accident 
happened by ignorant persons gathering the leaves of the Man¬ 
drake or May Apple (.Podophyllin pedatimi ). 
There seems in the vegetable world, as well as in the moral, 
two opposite principles, the good and the evil. The gracious God 
has given to man the power, by the cultivation of his intellect, to 
elicit the good and useful, separating it from the vile and injurious, 
thus turning that into a blessing which would otherwise be a curse. 
“ The Arum family possess many valuable medicinal qualities,” 
says Dr. Charles Lee, in his valuable work on the medicinal plants 
of North America, “but would nevertheless become dangerous 
poisons in the diands of ignorant persons.” 
The useful Cassava, (.Zanipha Manipor ), of the West Indies 
and tropical America, is another remarkable instance of art over- 
