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.
1824Beardless: leaves ensiform, alternate; petals smaller than the stigma; root fleshy, the thickness of the thumb, spreading horizontally near the surface, blackish on the outside, reddish and spongy within; scapes from one to three feet in height, upright, alternately inclined from joint to joint, round or flatted a little, smooth and spongy; peduncles axillary, flat on one side, and smooth, each sustaining two or three flowers; corolla yellow; the three outer petals large. — It is common in most parts of Europe, in marshy meadows and fens, by the sides of rivers, brooks, lakes, pools, and ditches, flowering at the end of June or beginning of July. It is sometimes called Skeggs, or Lugs. The root has an acrid burning taste, and the juice, when snuffed up the nostrils, produces a great heat in the mouth and nose, occasioning a copious discharge, and hence it is recommended as a sialogogue and errhine. This root is such a powerful astringent, that it has been used instead of galls in making ink, and also for the purpose of dyeing black; owing to that quality, it has been successfully given in diarrhoeas, for which purpose it should be well dried, and given in doses of two or three drachms. The fresh root and its juice is so strong a cathartic, that eighty drops of the latter produced repeated evacuations, after jalap, gamboge, &c. had failed: this dose was given every hour or two in a little syrup of Buckthorn, and had very speedy effects, causing the patient to discharge by stool several Scots pints of water in the course of the night; and by continuing to use it in increased doses, it cured an inveterate dropsy. Hence Withering says, that, in dropsical cases, attended with obstinate obstructions of the viscera, eighty or a hundred drops of the juice of this root may be given every two hours. Gordon, one of the old writers on medicine, declares, that, if man can administer any thing to cure the dropsy, this root will; and Hill says his practice confirms the remark. The expressed juice is also said to be an useful application to serpiginous eruptions, and scrofulous tumors. M. Lovrat, a French chemist, has discovered, that the seed, when dried by heat, and freed fom the friable shell which envelopes it, produces a beverage similar to coffee, but much superior in taste and flavour.
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