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This is a newly discovered plant, known to but few botanists in the United States. It rises six or seven feet; the leaves grow in a cluster from the root to the top; blossoms, yellow; roots, small and black, about the size of cloves, and very tender, very much resembling the claws of an animal, and so full of nitre that the powder of the root, if kept in the open air, will liquify.

History.—This plant grows upon mountains and the sides of hills, in the Genesee country, and about Albany: the leaves ovate, and are two or three inches long.

Medical Virtues.—It is a powerful febrifuge, and I have found it a sure and quick medicine in exciting perspiration, without increasing the heat of the body. The root is effectual in all remittent, typhus, and nervous fevers, and will relieve the patient of all pains caused by colds.

Preparation.—After prescribing a mild puke of the American ipecacuanha, and the physic has done working, I give one or two ounces of the root, to be put into two quarts of rain water, and boiled down to one, and giving the patient, in bed, a teacupful of the strained liquor every hour, which causes a plentiful perspiration, and generally stops the fever in a few hours. The night-hectic fever, in a consumptive patient, I have relieved by the above treatment. It is an excellent medicine in pleurisy, and a sure remedy in erysipelatose fever.

Pulverize the root, sift the powder through a fine hair sieve, and put it in bottles, well stopped from the air. A teaspoonful of this powder may be taken every two hours, in a teacupful of black snakeroot tea, in order to raise a speedy diaphoresis, or perspiration, in pleurisies and fever, when they are violent.