[602] By the Romans Walnuts were scattered among the people when a marriage was celebrated, as an intimation that the wedded couple henceforth abandoned the frivolities of youth.
The "titmouse" walnut produces very delicate fruit, rich in oil, and with thin shells, so that the little creatures can pierce the husks and shells while the fruit is still on the bough.
Nuts of various kinds, being charged with carbon and oil, are highly nutritious, but on account of this oil abounding, they are not readily digested by some persons. In Southern Europe, the Chestnut is a staple article of food, The title "nut" signifies a hard round lump, from nodus, a knot.
Leigh Hunt wrote meaningly of the "inexorably hard cocoa nut— milky at heart." In Devonshire a plentiful crop of hazel nuts is believed to portend an unhealthy year:—
"Many nits (nuts)
Many pits (graves)."
When eating almonds and raisins at dessert we get the nitrogenous food of the nuts with the saccharine nourishment of the grapes.
WART-WORT, OR WART-WEED.
This name has been commonly applied to the Petty Spurge, or to the Sun Spurge, a familiar little weed growing abundantly in English gardens, with umbels of a golden green colour which "turn towards the sun." Its stem and leaves yield, when wounded, an acrid milky juice which is popularly applied for destroying warts, and corns. But our Greater Celandine (see page 92) or Swallow-wort is better known abroad as the Wart-wort: and its sap is widely given in Russia for the cure, not only of [603] warts, but likewise of cancerous outgrowths, whether occurring on the skin surface, or assailing membranes inside the body. Conclusive evidence has been adduced of cancerous disease within the gullet and the stomach—as well as on the external skin—being healed by this herb. Its sap, or juice, contains chemically, "chelidonine," and "sanguinarine," which latter principle (obtained heretofore from the Canadian "blood root"), is of long established repute for repressing fungoid granulations of indolent ulcers, when powdered over them, and of quickly advancing their cure. Each principle exercises a narcotic influence on the nervous system, and will, thereby, relieve spasmodic coughs. Healthy provers have taken the fresh juice of the Greater Celandine in doses of from twenty to two hundred drops, at repeated intervals; the results of the larger portions being drastic purgation, with persistent nervous torpor, and with an outbreak on the skin of irritating, sore, itching eruptions. In some of the provers active inflammatory congestion of the right lung ensued, with turgidity of the liver. The root beaten into a conserve with sugar will operate by stool, and by urine. For cancerous excrescences from five to ten drops of the fresh juice, or of the mother tincture (H.) should be given steadily three times a day, this quantity being reduced if it should move the bowels too freely. Some of the sap, or tincture, should be also used outwardly as a lotion, either by itself, or diluted with an equal quantity of cold water.
WATER PLANTS (Other).
(Water Dropwort, Water Lily, Water Pepper.)