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CHAP. 38.—THE SCANDIX: NINE REMEDIES. THE ANTHRISCUM: TWO REMEDIES.

The scandix,1 too, is reckoned by the Greeks in the number of the wild vegetables, as we learn from Opion and Erasistratus. Boiled, it arrests2 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 joke3 against the poet Euripides, that his mother used to sell not real vegetables, but only scandix.

The anthriscum4 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.

1 Sprengel identifies it with the Chærophyllum sativum of Linnæus, the scandix cerifolium, our common chervil; but Fée considers it to be the same as the Scandix pecten Veneris of Linnæus, the Venus' comb chervil. Pliny has mentioned a "scandix" also in B. xxi. c. 52, but erroneously, Fée thinks.

2 It is not used for any medicinal parposes at the present day.

3 Acharn. A. ii. sc. 4: "Get some scandix from your mother, and give it me." The same joke also appears in the "Equites;" and A. Gellius, B. xv. c. 20, says that Theopompus speaks of the mother of Euripides as having been a greengrocer.

4 Fée identifies it with the Anthriscus odoratus of Linnaus, the cultivated chervil. See B. xxi. c. 52.

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