Page:Indian Medicinal Plants (Text Part 2).djvu/151

Rh pedicels solitary. Flowers white, fruit a berry often 3 by lin., tapering at the end, pendent, elongate oblong, often curved, red, orange, white, purple or yellow. Seeds numerous, discoid. Embryo peripheric.

Uses:— Chillies are used in native practice in typhus, intermittent fevers and dropsy, also in gout, dyspepsia and cholera. Externally, they are used as rubefacient and, internally, used as stomachic (Atkinson).

" A dose of ten grains of finely powdered capsicum seed, given with an ounce of hot water, two or three times a day, sometimes shows wonderful effects in cases of delirium tremens " (Surg.-Major Gray, Lahore).

Its other uses are nearly the same as those of the following one, for which it might be used as a substitute.

Vern.: — Gâch marich (H.) ; Dhan lancâ-marich, lâl morich (B.) ; Lâl-mirich, marchâ (Guz.); Mirchi, lâl mirch (Duk.) ; Usi-mulaghaî (Tam.) ; Sudmirapa kaia (Tel.) ; Chalie, lodchina (Mal.) ; Kappal-melaka (Malabar).

Habitat : — Cultivated throughout India.

Throughout India extensively cultivated. Pedicels mostly 2-3 together. Berry small, often 1½ by ½in., red, suberect, elongate-oblong (Bird's eye chillee of the English denizen.)

Uses : — "Acts as an acid stimulant, and externally as a rubefacient, used in putrid sore-throat and scarlatina ; also in ordinary sore-throat, hoarseness, dyspepsia, and yellow fever ; and in diarrhoea occasionally ; also in piles " (Baden-Powell).

Braconnot obtained from capsicum, capsicin, a soft, non-crystalline compound with a pungent taste, and from this capsicum-red. Witting and Tresh maintain that the active constituent is a crystalline substance termed capsaicin. Pubst found a trace of an alkaloid ; he considers capsaicin to be an amorphous acid ; and he detected considerable amounts of free oleic, stearic, and palmitic acids in the fruit. He concludes that the red colour of the fruit is probably carotin.

The whole fruit (1) was found to contain 90.25 per cent, of dry matter, (2)