Family Herbal - Electric Scotland

282 FAMILY HERBAL.
agreeable to the stomach, good against sicknesses
and reacliings.
Rattle-Snake Root Plant. Seneca.
A small plant, native of America, with weak
stalks, iittlc leaves, and white flowers. It grows a
foot high. Tiie stalks are numerous, weak, and
round, few of them stand quite upright, some generally
lie upon the ground. The leaves stand irregularly
: they are oblong and somewhat broad, and
of a pale green. The flowers are little and white :
they stand in a kind of loose spikes, at the tops of
ihe stalks, and perfectly resemble those of the
common plant we call milkwort, of which it is' indeed
a kind : the whole plant has very much the
aspect of the taller kind of our English milkwort.
The root is of a singular form : it is long, irregu-
lar, slender, and divided into many parts, and these
have on each side, a kind of membranous margin
hanging from them, which makes it distinct in its
appearance, from all the other roots used in the
shops.
We owe the knowledge of this medicine, orisri-
nally to the Indians : they give it as a remedy against
the poison of the rattle-snake, but it has been
. ^tolled,
as possessing great virtues. Dr. Tcnnaut
brought it into England,
and we received it as a
powerful remedy against pleurisies, quinzies, and
ai! other diseases where the blood was sizey : it was
i;aid to dissolve this dangerous texture, better than
all oilier known medicines ; but experience does
v. t seem to have warranted altogether these effects,
for it is at present neglected, after a great many and
\er\ fair trials.
\Yhen this remedy was discovered to be the
root of a kind of polygala, which discovery was