This is one of our beautiful common plants, and can be seen and known at a distance, by its handsome golden flowers, which bloom in July: it rises about four feet in height, and has small oval leaves, which are numerous. HISTORY. It grows chiefly on fat clammy lands, in apple orchards, and in old upland pastures, throughout the United States. MEDICAL VIRTUES. The root is an excellent medicine in the cure of the dysentery and other flux, likewise in the colic and pleurisy; and is astringent, sudorific, carminative, and cathartic. PREPARATION. Cut the fresh root into thin slices, and after they are sufficiently dryed, pulverize them and sift the powder through an hair sieve, and put it in large bottles well secured with glass stoppers. Those troubled with flatulent or wind colic, may take a dose of caster oil, and after it has done working, take a tea-spoonful of the powder once an hour till well. For the pleurisy, after bleeding and purging, the patient may take a table-spoonful of the powder every two hours, in a tea-cup full of boneset tea, and keep in bed, which will cause him a fine perspiration, and thereby cure the disorder. In the dysentery and diarrhoea, the patient must first take a dose of rhubarb, and the next day a tea-spoonful of the powder every hour, in a tea-cup full of yarrow tea, increasing the powder as he finds benefit: a few doses generally effects a cure. His common drink may be a tea-cup full of tea made of longwort, sweetened with loaf sugar, four or five times a day. This plant rises two feet in height: hath many tender round green stalks, with larger joints than is common in other plants, very brittle and easy to brake leaves large, serrated, and very tender: the flowers, consisting of four leaves, are yellow, after which come long pods with blackish seed therein; the root is long at the head, shooting forth many long roots with small fibres, redish externally and yellow within, and full of yellow sap. HISTORY. This plant grows wild along the sides of meadows, and by running brooks. MEDICAL VIRTUES. It is acrid, stimulant, aperient, detergent, diuretic, and sudorific. The juice rubbed on warts extirpates them, cures ring worms, and cleanses old ulcers. It has been found beneficial in dropsy, cachexy, and green sickness. A poultice made of this plant boiled in milk, has cured the herpes miliaris. Infusions of the plant in vinegar, pròmote perspiration. eye PREPARATION. In order to take a film off the eye, take half a gill of the expressed juice of the leaves of celandine,and one gill of the fresh juice of the leaves of ground ivy, called alehoof, dissolve a tea-spoonful of salt in it, and keep it in sand in a cellar for use. The film must be wet with a small hair brush dipped in this juice, three times a day, and afterwards wash the with a little warm milk and water. To cure the above complaint, the patient may take twenty or thirty drops every morning, and evening of the expressed juice of this plant, in a gill of new milk, or half a tea-spoonful of the powder of the root in milk twice a day, increasing the dose occasionally. Twenty drops of the juice mixed in an ounce of rose water makes an excellent eye water, which will cure the most inveterate sore eyes, by wetting them morning and evening. A poultice made of the roasted roots mashed in vinegar, and applied to scrophulus tumours on the neck, quickly disperses them. An ointment made of the roots boilded in hogs lard cures the piles, by anointing them with it every night before the fire, and taking daily, a tea-spoonful of cream of tarter and flour of sulphur in honey. This useful plant rises about ten inches in height: stalks erect: leaves opposite, sesile, oblong, and obtuse: flowers terminal, in bunches, of a pink red colour, the calyx is cut into five erect |