The Universal Herbal;
or botanical, medical and agricultural dictonary.
Containing an account of All the known Plants in the World, arranged according to the Linnean system. Specifying the uses to which they are or may be applied, whether as food, as medicine, or in the arts and manufactures.
With the best methods of propagation, and the most recent agricultural improvements.
collected from indisputable Authorities.
Adapted to the use of the farmer - the gardener - the husbandman - the botanist - the florist - and country housekeepers in general.
By Thomas Green.
Vol. I
Liverpool.
Printed at the Caxton Press by Henri Fisher.
Printer in Ordinary to His Majesty.
1824Leaves in eights, lanceolate; keels scabrous, with prickles pointing backwards; joints viliose; root annual; stem four feet high or more, weak, and supporting itself on other plants, brittle-jointed; the joints villose at the base; the angles are set with pellucid prickles, pointing downwards; it is very branched, and the branches are opposite; flowers few and small, on rough peduncles; calix none; corolla whitish, scarcely longer than the germen, divided to the base into four ovate acute segments. This plant is reckoned to purify the biood, and is therefore a common ingredient in spring broth. The expressed juice of the herb, taken to the amount of four ounces, or a quarter of a pint, night and morning, during several weeks, is very efficacious in removing many of those cutaneous eruptions, which are commonly, though improperly, called scorbutic. It has been much celebrated in scrofulous and cancerous sores; but it must be confessed, that the experiments made in our hospitals have not confirmed its celebrity. The juice of the stem and leaves, are acknowledged nevertheless to be of a cooling nature: it increases the urinary discharge, and is therefore esteeemed in the jaundice, dropsy, suppression of urine, gravel, and other disorders that arise from obstructions of the viscera. Linneus says, that this plant is very apt to infest crops of peas; and that the Swedes use the stalks as a filter, to strain their milk through. Dioscorides observes, that the same use was made of it in his time, and it certainly is not a bad substitute, to take hairs out of the milk, where a sieve is not at hand. The seeds have been used instead of coffee. The roots, like most others of this genus, will dye red, and are found to tinge the bones of the birds that eat them, of that colour. As it is an annual weed, it is easily destroyed, if it be cut or plucked up early, for it begins to seed in June. — It is common in hedges and cultivated grounds. The well-known property of adhering to whatever it comes in contact with, has given this plant the names of cleavers, clevers, clivers, and catchweed or scratch weed; from the same idea, it also derived the more elegant appellation of philanthrophon, among the Greeks and Romans; from its roughness, it has been called hariff, or rather hairough: and from being a favourite food or medicine of geese, goose-grass, goose-share, and gosling-weed.
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