302  Utilisation  of  Our  Own  Resources.    { Am-ju?y,ri9Pi5arm' 
and  forests  and  which  exist  so  largely  in  our  own  soils.  A  few 
years  ago,  on  a  visit  to  Mr.  Sidney  Phelan,  at  Roberta,  Ga.,  I  noticed 
an  enormous  amount  of  peaches  going  to  waste,  and  wrote  an  article 
for  the  Constitution  that  at  a  small  cost  a  crusher  could  be  used  to 
utilize  the  seeds  and  extract  the  peach  oil.  At  that  time  the  firm  of 
Jacobs's  Pharmacy  was  importing  peach  oil  from  abroad  and  paying 
from  25  to  30  cents  a  pound.  The  Constitution  followed  this  article 
up  with  an  editorial,  but  it  ended  then  and  there. 
The  early  American  practitioners  were  forced  to  depend  upon 
native  drugs,  because  of  scarcity  of  foreign  supplies.  The  later 
generations  have  been  accustomed  to  receive  drugs  bearing  foreign 
stamp  of  approval  in  use.  As  facilities  for  communication  with 
foreign  countries  are  now  more  highly  developed,  we  have  come, 
unconsciously,  to  depend  upon  foreign  sources  for  a  large  proportion 
of  articles  of  our  materia  medica.  At  the  time  of  this  writing  sup- 
plies are  not  available  to  any  great  extent,  and  this  seems  to  be  a 
moment  when  we  should  turn  to  our  own  resources  and  see  what  a 
country  with  such  a  wide  variation  in  climatic  and  soil  conditions  as 
the  United  States  can  produce.  We  cannot  entirely  replace  foreign 
drugs,  but  we  can  replace  many  of  them  by  native  drugs,  which, 
for  lack  of  notice,  have  fallen  into  disuse.  We  have  reached  a  point 
where  it  is  more  difficult  every  dayx  to  buy  goods,  and  each  day  we 
see  evidences  of  articles  that  have  simply  become  non-procurable, 
and,  with  goods  shut  off  entirely  from  Germany,  this  will  grow  from 
day  to  day.  Domestic  chemicals,  too,  have  become  scarce  from 
the  unprecedented  demand  from  the  other  side,  and  manufacturers 
in  many  cases  have  withdrawn  entirely  from  the  market. 
A  List  of  Substitutes. 
I  here  append  a  list  of  substitutes  that  were  used  by  druggists  and 
physicians  during  the  war  in  large  quantities,  in  most  of  the  instances 
being  the  only  medicines  of  the  kind  to  be  had : 
For  Columbo,  yellow  root;  for  Spanish  flies,  potato  bugs,  pow- 
dered leaves  of  butternut;  for  jalap,  wild  jalap,  wild  potato  vine, 
fever  root;  for  aloes,  wild  jalap,  mulberry  bark,  butternut,  dock,  wild 
potato  vine,  Amer.  Colombo;  for  quinine  and  Peruvian  bark,  tulip 
tree  bark,  dogwood,  cotton-seed  tea,  chestnut  root  and  bark,  chin- 
quapin root  and  bark,  thoroughwort,  Spanish  oak  bark,  knob  grass, 
willow  bark ;  for  digitalis,  blood- root,  wild  cherry,  pipsissewa,  bugle 
