Page:Botanic drugs, their materia medica, pharmacology, and therapeutics (1917).djvu/22

 strong points and limitations. Hence, when any one of the Smiths lays claim to ability and characteristics foreign to the family in general, we indulge our doubts until after he proves out in his claims. Botanically we may know the Labiatae as mints and non-poisonous aromatics. We may look up this order of plants in a work on botany and note that forty-five species of them are indigenous to the United States, Thymus vulgaris being the most active one. And yet hedge hyssop, of this order, has recently been exploited as one ingredient of a remedy for cancer. Knowing the Labiatae, how improbable is it that any member of the order would, or could, have any influence upon the course of so serious a disease!

On the other hand, when echinacea is exploited as a remedy by many physicians, some claiming much for it, and others—those opposed—wholly condemning the plant as inert, it need be no stranger to us, for we know its natural order, the Compositae. So we look up the Compositae and find that one- tenth of all the flowering plants of the world are of this order and few of them poisonous, the exceptions being Liatris odoratissima, used in smoking tobacco, and producing cerebral intoxication; tansy, which has occasionally caused death; Artemisia absinthium, the toxic agent of absinthe, which the French Government has found necessary to suppress; and perhaps a few more. Others of the order, while not actively toxic, are possessed of definite activity. We may note lactucarium, eupatorium, erigeron, grindelia, matricaria, and taraxacum.

So, then, there is at least some ground for us to expect that echinacea may be one of the excep-