Family Herbal - Electric Scotland

23Q FAMILY HERBAL.
The. root is used ; an infusion of it opens ob-
structions ; it is good against the jaundice. A decoction
of the whole plant, fresh gathered, works
powerfully by urine, and is good against the gravel.
It also gently promotes the menses.
Sugar Came A rundo saccharifera.
A kind of reed, native of the East and West
Indies, of the Canary islands, and of some other
places ; and cultivated in all our plantations. It
is eight or ten feet high. The stalk is round,
hollow, hard, jointed, and upright ; it is very like
thiit of a common reed, only so much thicker.
The leaves are like those of the reed, but vastly
larger ; and the flowers arc in the same manner, dry,
brown, and chaffy, but the cluster of them is a
yard long ; the roots are
long, creeping, and jointed
in the manner of the stalk. In very hot countries
the sugar will sweat out at the cracks of the stalks,
and stand in form of a bright powder ; this is native
sugar, and is what the antients meant when they
talked of honey growing upon reeds. We press out
the
juice, and boil it fo the consistence of brown
which is afterwards refined, and becomes the
sugar,
white powder or loaf-sugar.
It were idle to talk of the virtues of sugar, its
uses are sufficiently known, and are very great.
Sumach Rhus.
A shrub, native of warmer countries, but
common in our gardens.
It is of a singular appearance.
It doses not grow more than ten or
twelve feet high ; the wood is brittle, and the bark
is brown. The leaves are long and very beautiful,
each consists of a great many pairs of smaller