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2 IMTRODUCTION TO BOTANY.
But these commercial ideas have less force in the country.
There the practitioner has more time on his hands ; in his
rounds to visit his patients, he can collect the herbs pro-
fusely scattered in his path, and although his education at
the hospitals in town naturally influences him in his choice,
yet if prudence has any share in his character, he must be
struck with the impropriety of neglecting the resources
freely offered by nature to his possession for purchased ones.
It is a favourite axiom with botanical physicians that where
nature produces diseases, there she also produces the remedies
for them, and they adduce in proof of this dogma, the
growth of scurvy grass, and other antiscorbutic plants in
those cold climates where scurvy reigns as an epidemic ; of
pepper and other spices in hot countries where the stomach
is liable to torpor, and requires an extraordinary stimulus to
promote its healthy action ; as also of calamus aromaticus
in those humid situations which are liable to intermittent
fevers; and of sarsaparilla and guiacum in the regions, supposed
to be the native seats of the venereal lues, and where,
according to a Spanish traveller, d'Aranda, in his account
of South America, it is a sporadic disease. Without absolutely
professing a dogma, which has much appearance of
truth in it, there can be no doubt but that the remedies necessary
for most of the diseases that afflict human nature
may be found at the country practitioner's own door, or
very near at hand. That he may be enabled however to
make use of them, it is necessary he should know them well,
the more especially as many plants are so much alike, that
it requires attention directed to proper characteristics to
distinguish them. Now botany is that science which enables
us to distinguish plants from one another, to assign to them
their proper names, and to declare their several uses;
without which last part, although too often neglected by
the general botanist, it would be a barren study.
Another part of medicine, in which the use of botany
is evident, too frequently happens, in consequence of the
similitude of plants to one another, so that those ignorant
of the means of distinguishing them are led to use a plant
of such powerful action on the human frame as to kill, or
very violently affect, the unfortunate person who has mistaken
it for some nutriraental vegetable, especially foreign-
ers, who use a greater variety of vegetables than ourselves.
Yet even among us, the instances are not rare in which
hemlock has been mistaken for parsley, the roots of wild