Josselyn gives in his "New England's Rarities" an interesting list of the herbs known and used by the colonists. Cotton Mather said the most useful and favorite medicinal plants were alehoof, garlick, elder, sage, rue, and saffron. Saffron has never lost its popularity. To this day "saffern tea" is a standing country dose in New England, especially for the "jarnders." Elder, rue, and saffron were English herbs that were made settlers here and carefully cultivated; so also were sage, hyssop, tansy, wormwood, celandine, comfrey, mallows, mayweed, yarrow, chamomile, dandelion, shepherd's-purse, bloody dock, elecampane, motherwort, burdock, plantain, catnip, mint, fennel, and dill--all now flaunting weeds. Dunton wrote, with praise of a Dr. Bullivant, in Boston, in 1686, "He does not direct his patients to the East Indies to look for drugs when they may have far better out of their gardens." There is a charm in these medical rules in my old book, in spite of the earth-worms and wood-lice and adders and vipers in which some of them abound (to say nothing of other and more shocking ingredients). In surprising and unpleasant compounds they do not excel the prescriptions in a serious medical book published in Exeter, New Hampshire, as late as 1835. Nor is Cotton Mather's favorite and much-vaunted ingredient _millepedes_, or sowbugs, once mentioned within. All are not vile in my Queen's Closet--far from it. Medicines composed of Canary wine or sack, with rose-water, juice of oranges and lemons, syrup of clove-gillyflower, loaf sugar, "Mallago raisins," nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, mace, remind me strongly of Josselyn's New England Nectar, and render me quite dissatisfied with our modern innovations of quinine, antipyrine, and phenacetin, and even make only passively welcome the innocuous and uninteresting homo[eo]pathic pellet and drop. Many other dispensatories, guides, collections, and records of medical customs and concoctions, remain to us even of the earliest days. We have the private receipt-book of John Winthrop, a gathering of choice receipts given to him in manuscript by one Stafford, of England. These receipts have been printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society for the year 1862, with delightful notes by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and are of the same nature as those in the Queen's Closet. Here is one, which was venomous, yet harmless enough: