Page:Indian Medicinal Plants (Text Part 1).djvu/393

Rh outside, pubescent within. Staminal-tube somewhat tapering, hairy within, teeth spreading, filiform ; anthers nearly sessile ; style long, stigma clavate, 5-toothed. Drupe ovoid, 1-1½in., smooth and shining, yellowish. Seeds solitary in each cell ; pointed, smooth, brown.

Part used :— The fruit.

Uses : —The pulp of the fruit has a bitter nauseous taste. It is a favourite remedy amongst the laboring classes for colic, half a fruit being the dose for an adult. It appears to have hardly any purgative properties, but is said to relieve the pain most effectively. In the Concan, the juice of the green fruit, with a third of its weight of sulphur, and an equal quantity of curds, heated together in a copper pot, is used as an application to scabies, and to sores infested with maggots (Dymock, 173.)

Vern. :— Thitto (Burm.) ; Santor (Malay).

Habitat: — Eastern Peninsula; from Rangoon, Tenasserim to Penang. Introduced into the Western Peninsula.

Trimen : —Sinhalese name— Lunu-midella. Tamil — Malal-Vêmpu.

An evergreen tree, with trifoliate, coriaceous leaves, attaining 60ft. Wood close-grained, moderately hard, medullary rays conspicuous on radial section. Branchlets, inflorescence and leaves velvety. Flowers yellow, in narrow axillary panicles. Staminal-tube 10-dentate, style articulate at base, clavate above, ending in a thickened ring, bearing five obtuse stigmatic lobes, fruit globose, 3in. diam., yellow and velvety when ripe ; exocarp a fleshy and edible pulp, endocarp lining the cells, horny, covered with a densely felted mass of long pluricellular hairs, over 1/6in. long. Cotyledons filled with starch and oil.

Use : — The root, which is bitter, bruised with vinegar and water, is used by the Amboyans as a carminative and also in cases of diarrhœa and dysentery (Rumphius).

Syn : — Milnea Roxburghiana W. and A., A. odoratissima, Blume.