Page:Indian Medicinal Plants (Text Part 1).djvu/622

542 tinge, with an irregular, dark-purple heartwood, close-grained, fairly durable. Branchlets, leaf-buds and young leaves, with soft shining generally rust-coloured hairs. Leaves distant, often sub-opposite, elliptic or ovate ; secondary nerves 6-8 pair, arching, prominent; blade 3-8in. long, petiole ½-lin. long. Two glands or swellings on petiole near top. Flowers bisexual, 1/6in. across, sessile, dull white or yellow, with an offensive smell. Spikes sometimes simple, usually in short panicles, terminal and in the axils of the uppermost leaves. Bracts subulate or lanceolate, longer than buds, deciduous. Limb of Calyx cup-shaped, cleft half way into 5 acute, triangular segments, woolly inside. Fruit more or less distinctly 5-angled, obovoid from a cuneate base, sometimes ovoid or nearly globose, l-l½in. long ; shape and size of fruit varies accordingly.

Mr. Duthie writes : — " In Northern India the tree does not attain to any great size, but large trees, up to 100 feet in height, are often met with south of the Nerbudda."

Uses : — Sanskrit writers describe chebulic myrobalans as laxative, stomachic, tonic and alterative. They are used in fevers, cough, asthma, urinary diseases, piles, intestinal worms, chronic diarrhœa, costiveness, flatulence, vomiting, hiccup, heart-diseases, enlarged spleen and liver, ascites, skin diseases, &c. In combination with embelic and beleric myrobalans, they are extensively used as adjuncts to other medicines in almost all diseases. As an alterative tonic for promoting strength, preventing the effects of age and prolonging life, it is used in a peculiar way. (Dutt).

Mahomedan writers consider the ripe fruit as purgative, removing bile, phlegm and adjust bile. The unripe fruit is most valued on account of its astringent and aperient properties, and is a useful medicine in dysentery and diarrhœa. Ainslie notices their use as an application to aphthæ (Dymock).

" The fruits are used as a medicine for sore-throat, by the Paharias in Sikkim" (Gamble).

Recently M. P. Apery has brought to the notice of the profession in Europe the value of the drug in dysentery, choleraic