=Rosin-Weed among the Indians.= This rosin-weed is not a poisonous plant. Children all over the west gather the resin for chewing-gum as the Indians did before them and horses eat it freely, being thereby protected from the heaves, as the frontier tradition goes. Rosin-weed was valued highly by the Indian. He chewed the gum to make his breath sweet and drank a decoction of the root to make him live forever. The rosin-weed of the Indian is the parallel of the ancient silphion, the opoponax or _all-healing juice_ of southern Europe, the spruce gum and pine tar of rural America and the more valued resins of the East where, in Othello's time, the trees dropped down their medicinal gum; for we find the native gums used all over the world for the same diseases, cough and consumption and urinary distress, always with a dash of mystery and the idea of prolonging life. =Rosin-Weed among the Eclectics.= One would have thought that the early American botanic physicians who worked so industriously to introduce American plants and who learned the use of many native plants from the Indians, would have adopted such a popular remedy but I find no mention of it in their books. The learned writer in the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_ was correct in writing, in 1821, Volume 51, page 312, that there were several varieties of silphium, all growing in America, but that none of them as yet had been used as medicines. It was reserved for a successor of the old botanic school, an eclectic physician, Dr. H. B. Garrison, to introduce rosin-weed into medical practice as a specific for asthma in an article in the _Eclectic Medical Review_ in 1868. This article was abstracted in the _Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal_, in the _Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery_ and in Francis Porcher's _Medical Botany of the Southern States_, second edition, 1869 (not in the first edition of 1863). Dr. Garrison noted also the popular belief that heaves or asthma did not exist in horses on the prairies where this plant grew. For a few years, rosin-weed became popular and was widely commented on in the eclectic journals; but it soon dropped out of sight and is not to be found in any eclectic text books to-day. ROSIN-WEED AMONG THE HOMOEOPATHS. Rosin-weed comes into the homoeopathic school through "the indefatigable Dr. Hale," as Richard Hughes calls him. The homoeopathic school owes much to Dr. E. M. Hale, who enriched our materia medica with many American plants, most of them drawn from the eclectic school and, be it noted, Dr. Hale gives full credit to that school from which the new medicines came. Dr. Hale did masterly work in proving the new remedies and verifying the observations of the eclectic physicians and published his _Characteristics of New Remedies_ in 1864. In 1868, Dr. Garrison published his paper on the use of rosin-weed in asthma and Dr. Hale, in his third edition of 1873, included rosin-weed under the name _silphium laciniatum_, as follows: