PREPARATION.

Take the pear while green and split it with a knife, scrape off the inner soft mucilage, and apply some of it spread upon a clean linen rag over the sore twice a day until cured. For corns, soak the feet in warm water for ten minutes, pare the horney part with a razor, and bind a fresh piece of the inner side of the pear on the corn twice a day, and in a few days your corns will be cured. The following decoction has been found of great benefit in violent scorbutic humours, such as dropsy, cancers and scurvy: boil a large hand full of the prickly pear, cut in thin slices, in a quart of new milk, and take a gill every other morning.

PURSLAIN.

PORTULACA.

DESCRIPTION.

This plant is well known by every housewife in the country, and most people in the city: it rises a foot or more in height, has smooth redish succulent brittle stalks, with fleshy thick leaves, broader at the point than next the stalk: flowers grow on the tops of the stalks among the leaves, very small, five leaved, and yellow, succeeded by round vessels including small black ruff seed.

HISTORY.

This plant is cultivated in gardens, and when wild grows plentifully on poor sandy grounds, and near water brooks.

MEDICAL VIRTUES.

This plant is an astringent, a febrifuge, and antivenereal.

PREPARATION.

For the arder of urine and the clap, pour two quarts of boiling rain water on four ounces of the dry herb and two ounces of the slippery elm bark : dose, half a pint, taken three times a day. First,

in case of recent clap, the patient must take a dose of caster oil, or sal glauber, and while taking the medicine, he must abstain from all spirituous liquors, and live upon fresh diet. In all sharpness of urine, and fevers, the patient must take an hand full of dry purslain and balm leaves, put them in a tea-pot of boiling water, and sharpen it with twenty drops of elixer vitriol: he will find this an excellent drink; dose, half a pint before breakfast and dinner. It is also beneficial in bringing worms from children,

QUEEN OF THE MEADOWS.

SPIREA ULMARIA.

DESCRIPTION.

This beautiful plant rises four feet in height: has tall smooth reddish stalks: leaves long, spear shaped, and opposite each other: flowers purple.

HISTORY.

It grows in hedges and on the sides of meadows throughout the United States.

MEDICAL VIRTUES.

The root is a most powerful diuretic, and is the only part that I have ever used. For the suppression of urine and in the dropsy, I have found it beneficial.

PREPARATION.

Boil eight ounces of the bruised roots in four quarts of rain water down to two, and strain it for

use. In the dropsy, you must first take an emetic, and an anodine pill the same night: the next day begin with the decoction, by taking a tea-cup full warm every two hours, increasing the dose according as you can bear it, until all the water is evacuated by urine, and then take tonic medicines in order to restore your health. Women who are in

pain from the difficulty of making water, may begin with a tea-cup full every morning and night, sweetened with honey, after taking a dose of caster oil or sal epsom, increasing the dose according as they find the effect it will be necessary to take a little blood from the foot, and use the warm bath.