Southall's Organic materia medica : being a handbook treating of some of the more important of the animal and vegetable drugs made use of in medicine, including the whole of those contained in the British pharmacopoeia.

  • Southall, W. (William)
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Southall's Organic materia medica : being a handbook treating of some of the more important of the animal and vegetable drugs made use of in medicine, including the whole of those contained in the British pharmacopoeia. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or cndopleum. The testa not infrequently has appendages useful for dis- semination purposes, e.g., the wing of the Pine seed, the cotton of the seed of Gossypium, the awn of Strophanthus, etc.; again, it may be covered with short hairs, or its epidermal cell-walls may be gelatinous or mucila- ginous (cress, flax), thus affording a useful power of cohesion. The rhaphe may be prominent and easily discernible (Nux Vomica), or it may be hidden. Certain seeds have appendages of more or less crest-like form, e.g., the caruncle of the seed of Ricinus, while an accessory seed covering, more or less complete, is formed during the ripening of certain seeds which is known as the aril. The point from which the growth of the aril normally takes place is the hilum, but in the nutmeg it is formed round the micropylar end ; it may be either fleshy (Podophyllum) or mem- branous (Cardomum). The albumen or food material may be present in the seed either surrounding the embryo in which case the seed is said to be albuminous, or the embryo may, in the course of its development, have absorbed the whole of the food material and so rendered the seed exalbu- minous. The albumen may be farinaceous {e.g., cereals); oily {e.g., poppy); Jleshy {e.g., horse-chestnut); corneous {e.g., coffee); bony {e.g., vegetable ivory); or un-uniform {e.g., nutmeg, where by the involution of the tegmen, it becomes ruminated). The embryo consists of three parts, viz., the radicle or caulicle, the cotyledons, or seed leaves, and the plwnule, or primary shoot of the future plant. The disposition of the embryo with regard to the albumen is various, it being either straight or variously curved, while the cotyledons may be more or less separated, or folded on one another in many different ways. General Chemical Characters of Seeds.—Since the seed is the reservoir of reserve food material for the young plant, it usually consists largely of nutritive substance, carbohydrate, proteids, or fats, &c. In the cereals and in many leguminous seeds, such as Physostigma, we meet with starch and proteid matter, the latter in the form of gluten in the cereals, of legumin in the Leguminosse. Fat or fixed oil is also frequently met with, e.g., seeds of castor, flax, nutmeg, etc. The seed commonly contains also some ferment by means of which, during germination, the food material is rendered soluble and capable of absorption by the young plant. Associated with these and similar inert substances are to be found those active principles to the presence of which the medicinal seeds owe their value ; these are of the most various kinds, and must be regarded as excretory products, since they appear to have no useful place in the plant economy. The amount of mineral matter or ash present in seeds varies from i or per cent. (Nux Vomica) to as much as 8 or g per cent. (Stavesacre), and contains usually potash, soda, magnesia, lime, phosphorus, sulphur, silica, and iron in varying proportions, the phosphorus being commonly present in excess of the other elements.