demand. The price paid for the leaves and tops ranges from three to eight cents a pound while the seed brings from fifteen to twenty cents a pound. It should be borne in mind that the lobelia is poisonous and it is the intention of the government's experts who are directing at tention to the value of certain weeds to impress upon the minds of the gatherers that the medicinal properties of the harvest should not be tested at home, but left rather as subjects for the physician's prescription.

Everyone who is drawn. beyond the shadow of city walls knows the burdockArctium lappa. If one does not know it by either of the names first given, he probably can pick a familiar name from these: cockle button, beggars' buttons, hurr-bur, stick button, hardock and bardane.

The burdock is unsightly but useful. It has a neighbor, in many places, the skunk cabbage, which most people hold in detestation, but the skunk cabbage is worthy nevertheless. It is the first of the meadow growths to feel the impelling influence of spring, and in the summer when all other creatures avoid it, the Maryland yellow-throat, a birdbeauty above all other bird-beauties, builds its nest in its heart.

Fully 50,000 pounds of burdock root are brought into this country annually from Belgium for medicinal use. There is no reason why the native burdock should not be marketed. The seeds are of service in medicine also, both roots and seeds being used in blood and skin diseases. The leaves have a value in the fresh state as cooling poultices which are applied to certain forms of swelling and ulcers. The root of the burdock is worth from three to eight cents per pound and the seed is worth from five to ten cents. Golden seal, Hydrastis Canadensis, called a weed generally, has been lifted by the scientist into the kingdom of plants. Lewis and Clark while on their expedition collected specimens of the golden seal and Lewis wrote of it as be

ing considered a sovereign remedy for sore eyes in many parts of the western country. Further he says "It makes an excellent mouth wash.'

The Indians knew the value of the weed which at the first was rejected of the white man. They used the root as a medicine and the juices of stems and leaves as a dye for their clothing and a stain for their faces.

POKEWEED.

A valuable remedy for allaying inflammation.

Like every other thing that grows and is known to the country folk, the golden seal has a legion of common names, yellow-root, yellow puccoon, orange root, yellow paint, Indian paint, Indian dye, golden root, curcuma, wild turmeric, yellow eye, jaundice root, ground raspberry, and others, most of which are suggested by the color of the root, the appearance of the fruit or the uses which the plant serves.

The first general demand for golden

seal was created by the members of the eclectic school of practitioners sixty years ago. The root of the plant has occupied a place in the pharmacopoeia of the United States for forty-seven years. Golden seal is disappearing in its wild state before the advance of civilization. It grows in open woods, and deforestation is exterminating it. It is a valuable drug plant and the Department of Agriculture is now experimenting in its cultivation with the belief that before long it can be shown that a profitable industry can be maintained in growing it upon lands properly conditioned for its thriving.

Pokeweed carries in its name the word of contumely. It cannot escape classification with the supposedly evil things of the field as long as its second syllable holds its place It is common from the New England states to Minnesota and from the lakes and the St. Lawrence to the gulf. While Americans. spurn the weed, visiting Europeans some years ago took a fancy to it, carried it across the water and gave it a place as an ornamental garden plant.

for various diseases of the blood and the skin and in certain cases for allaying pain and reducing inflammation. The useful products of the weed are worth. five cents a pound in the market.

There is a big American woodpecker, Colaptes auratus, which has thirty-seven names. In one section of the country he bears one name and in other sections other names. In the botanical field, the foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, is a close second in the matter of common names to our friend the woodpecker. It is probable that persons who don't know the foxglove by the specific appellation given, may know it under some of the following designations: thimbles, fairy cap, fairy fingers, fairy thimbles, fairy bells, dog's finger, finger, finger flower, lady's glove, lady-fingers, lady's thimble, popdock, flapdock, flopdock, lion's mouth, rabbit's flower, cottagers, throatwort, and Scotch mercury. The foxglove is a handsome flowering weed which was originally introduced into this country from Europe as a garden plant, but it has escaped from the bounds of civilization and in many parts of the country is assuming the character of a weed. The foxglove occasionally grows to a height of more than four feet. It flowers in June and its blossoms have a beauty beyond that of most of the flowers of the field and garden. The plant, or weed as you will, supplies to the medical world the drug known as digitalis. It is of great value in heart troubles and at least 60,000

Pokeweed attains a height at times of nine feet. In summer it produces long clusters of whitish flowers which are followed in the fall by green berries which later ripen and turn to a rich purple color. Both the berries and the roots are employed in a medicine. The berries are poisonous and the making of remedies there from should be left to the scientist. Root and berry are used

pounds of the drug are imported into America from Europe every year. None of the home product ever has been used, but an "assay" has shown that the leaves of the wild American plant are fully as valuable as are those of the foxglove of Europe.

Both the leaves and the seed of the jimson weed, Datura stramonium, are medicinal Jimson grows throughout the entire warmer sections of the United States and in most places it bears a name by which, if it has any feelings in the matter, it probably is in no wise proud to be distinguished -stinkweed. Stramonium, the product of jimson, is used principally to relieve asthma. More than 100,000 pounds of the leaves of the weed are imported into America every year. and there seems to be no good reason why the home product should not be used to supply the demand. The leaves of the jimson are poisonous and the country doctor has had many a hurry up call to attend children who have put the flowers and the seeds of the weed into their mouths. A little of the juice goes a long way in the matter of poisoning.

Boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum, brings up memories of drastic childhood doses. People call the weed feverwort, sweating plant, teasel and ague weed. Boneset belongs to the aster family,

citizens of the country districts should not make money by plucking them.

The drug known as pinkroot is derived from the underground portion of the plant-no weed this Spigelia marilandica, which grows abundantly throughout the southern states. For years pinkroot as a vermifuge held an important place in materia medica. By and by the plant began to lose caste among physicians and within the last fifty years its use has greatly decreased.

Dr. R. H. True of the Government's Bureau of Plant Industry became interested in the fact that pinkroot was being driv en from the market and he undertook an investigation to find out the reason for the decline in the drug's reputation for efficiency. He discovered that an unsuspected substitute had crept into the market and had to a considerable degree replaced the true article. As a result of this Washington expert's work, pinkroot as a remedy may come into its own again.

There are more wild medicinal plants in the United States than are dreamed of by any, save the doctor, the druggist and the botanist. There may be money in weeds for an enterprising person, who will take the trouble to write to the Bureau of Plant Industry in Washington. It will return an answer that it is well within the range of possibilities may prove the inspiration of a profitable and unique business.

but while the asters, or some of them at least, are reared carefully in garden spots, the boneset is relegated to the wilds of the field. Boneset leaves are worth from two to eight cents a pound, and as the weed grows abundantly, there is no reason why American.

And the answer of the Bureau will not be based on theory, for it has successfully raised several crops of most of the weeds mentioned above and has

marketed the product in competition with the imported and often at a decided advance in price. These experimental crops have been raised at Burlington, Vermont, in connection with the State Agricultural Experimental Station, on the Potomac flats, near Washington, and at Ebenezer, S. C., so that a fairly wide range of soil and temperature has been tested. With golden seal, one of the most valuable of the medicinal weeds - the roots being valued at from $1.30 to $1.50 a pound-the latest experiments have proved entirely successful and a bulletin been published and can be obtained from the Agricultural Department, which gives full direction for its planting and cultivation.

has

wormseed. This patch yielded at the rate of over a thousand pounds an acre, and gave a net income practically double that received from cotton grown on soil of

At Ebenezer, S. C., the experiments were on a somewhat larger scale than elsewhere. Several hundred pounds of stramonium leaf were grown, cured by artificial heat in a barn ordinarily used for the curing of tobacco, and sold to the trade at a price higher than that quoted for the imported. But the best results from a financial standpoint were had with a plot of American

the same kind. The next spring it was found that the plants renewed themselves from the roots, thus saving all the expense and time of reseeding.

At the present time the experimenters of the Plant Bureau are, in co-operation with the various State Agricultural Stations, making tests which will cover most of the territory of the United States. They will be able shortly to tell accurately just what drug-weeds are best adapted to cultivation in various sections. They are especially desirous of finding profitable crops of a kind which can be grown in dry and arid countries, where irrigation may be too difficult to be immediately undertaken with profit.

But always it must be remembered that the demand for medicinal plant products is by no means unlimited and, for the present at least, their cultivation should be attempted only on a comparatively small scale and in combination with other standard farm crops.

In such cases it is the favorite trick of the hypnotist to assert very positively that sleep is fast approaching and to be using meanwhile artificial aids, producing the external symptoms of sleep-eye fatigue and heaviness of the eyelids. Feeling an increase of these symptomswhose real cause he does not understand -the subject, even if a stubborn one, unconsciously gains confidence in the hypnotist's ability to make him sleep and finally yields to it. To aid the nerve specialist in producing these external symptoms with the least possible expenditure of effort and time, various ingenious mechanical devices have been invented in recent years.

One of the newest of these mechanical aids employed by the hypnotist is the "hypnotic ball." It might be mistaken for the half of an hour-glass mounted upon a short handle of ebony. It is, in fact, a glass ball half filled with sand, and having a bottle-mouth, into which

Stuck

the wooden handle fits snugly. into the interior extremity of this handle

the end protruding inside the ball-is a pin, whose head extends to the center of the transparent globe. The sand is dyed a bright indigo blue as is the globular head of the pin. Thus we have a little ball-the pin-head-within a larger

FOR THE SUPERSTITIOUS.

Ignorant persons often attribute magic powers to steel magnets.