Latin Texts & Translations

The scandix, ^[Note] too, is reckoned by the Greeks in the number of the wild vegetables, as we learn from Opion and Erasistratus. Boiled, it arrests ^[Note] looseness of the bowels; and the seed of it, administered with vinegar, immediately stops hiccup. It is employed topically for burns, and acts as a diuretic; a decoction of it is good, too, for affections of the stomach, liver, kidneys, and bladder. It is this plant that furnished Aristophanes with his joke ^[Note] against the poet Euripides, that his mother used to sell not real vegetables, but only scandix.

The anthriscum ^[Note] would be exactly the same plant as the scandix, if its leaves were somewhat thinner and more odoritferous. Its principal virtue is that it reinvigorates the body when exhausted by sexual excesses, and acts as a stimulant upon the enfeebled powers of old age. It arrests leucorrhœa in females.