[29.] Panaces, or panax.) Dioscorides mentions three kinds of this, which are still retained by modern botanists. Considering the virtues he ascribes to each, I think it probable our author intends the panax Heracleum, or Hercules’s all heal, from whence the opopanax is produced. Though it is to be observed, that Pliny affirms the opopanax to be obtained from the panax Asdepium. Lib. xxv. cap. 4. P. Ægineta from the Heracleum lib. vii.
[30.] Cardamom.) It neither appears from Celsus nor Dioscorides, that the seed was in use among the ancients. Some affirm it to be the same with the modern greater cardamom. Dioscorides[ JA ] says, the best comes from Comagene, Armenia and Bosphorus. It grows also in Arabia and India. The best is firm, large, compact, and pungent to the smell, acrid and bitterish to the taste; it has a heating quality. By this it would seem they made use of the root.
[31.] Acorum according to Dioscorides has leaves likes the iris, but narrower, and roots not unlike to it, not growing straight, but oblique and creeping on the surface of the earth, whitish, divided by joints, acrid to the taste, and smelling not unpleasant. Lib. i. cap. 2.
[32.] The flower of long and round cyperus.) In the original Juncus quadratus et juncus rotundus. I shall not determine, whether what we now call cyperus longus, et rotundus, are the same as here mentioned. However, they certainly belong to the same class, and the virtues ascribed to the present, agree pretty nearly with those attributed to the ancient by Dioscorid. lib. i. cap. 4. and 16.—See also Dale and Schroder.
[33.] Bound upon the skin.) This seems a very odd way of using squils; the old reading appears much more just. Utiliter etiam scilla cocta delinitur cutis. It does good also to rub boiled squils over the skin. The same variety recurs at the end of the following paragraph, Sicut supra dixi delinitur, instead of Simul super ventrem deligatur.
[34.] Frequent pimples.) That is the smoothness or continuity of the skin is interrupted by pimples and ulcers.
[35.] Takes its rise from the head.) From a catarrh, which the ancients imagined to be a discharge from the brain through the os ethmoides.
[36.] Mild as gruel.) I have here departed from Linden and Almeloveen, who have it thus, Deinde lenis sorbitio, &c. Afterwards mild gruel, because the more ancient reading, Dein lenis, ut sorbitio, besides being more elegant, is confirmed by the following words of our author.
[37.] And especially brains.) I have taken no notice of the words ex prima in the reading of Linden and Almeloveen, which manifestly spoil the sense, otherwise complete without them. [ JB ]Morgagni observes, that all the other editions read, either ex pruna, or ex aprugna; but this last is not probable, because he said, that a boar was of the strongest class of food, lib. ii. but the whole head of a lamb or kid in the middle kind; and the former seems to be superfluous.