THE KOSSO, OR BKAYERA ANTHELMINTIC A. 
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ART. LXXIL— THE KOSSO, OR BRAYERA ANTHELMINTICA. 
By Jonathan Pereira, M. D. } F. R. S. 
[The following notice of Kosso is condensed from an elaborate 
paper, contained in the London Pharmaceutical Journal, for July, 
page 15. — Editor.] 
History. — Kosso has been used in Abyssinia as an anthel- 
mintic for more than two centuries. Bruce, in his ' Travels, ^-c^ 
published in London, 1790, mentions this medicine, which he 
called cusso, and proposed to call the tree Banksia Abyssini- 
ca, after Sir Joseph Banks, but that name having been appro- 
priated, it was subsequently named Brayera anthelmintica, 
by Kunth, after Dr. Brayer, a French physician who resided 
a considerable time at Constantinople, and who had witness- 
ed the valuable anthelmintic properties of kosso, and had him- 
self successfully employed this remedy. After his return to 
Paris, in 1823, Dr. B. sent some fragments of the male flow- 
ers to the Prussian botanist Kunth, who ascertained that the 
plant which yielded them formed a new genus, near to, but 
distinct from that of Agrimonia. 
Brayera anthelmintica, the only species of the genus yet 
decribed, is a tree twenty feet in height, branches round, 
rusty, tomentose-villose, marked by the annular cicatrices of 
the fallen leaves. Leaves crowded, alternate, interruptedly, 
impari-pinnate, and sheathing at the base. Leaflets oblong, 
or elliptically lanceolate, acute, serrate, villose at the margin 
and on the nerves of the under surface. Stipules adnate to 
the petiole, which is dilated at the base and amplexicaul. 
Flowers dioecious, small, greenish, and becoming purple : re- 
peatedly dichotomous ; the pedicil with an ovate bract at the 
base. The so-called male flowers may be regarded as her- 
maphrodite, inasmuch as the carpels are well developed. 
The female flowers are somewhat different in their struc- 
ture. The outer segments of the calyx are much more de- 
veloped than in the female flowers, and are four or five times 
