"=Clinical Observation.= For ten years, I have used silphium in asthma with large quantities of stringy mucus, in influenza, coryza, catarrh, and believe it to be the best remedy we have in phthisis when gray or yellow mucus is expectorated copiously, causing rapid exhaustion. I use the second decimal trituration in one or two-grain doses every two hours until expectoration is diminished perceptibly and then at intervals of four or six hours until expectoration is diminished to a degree consistent with other symptoms of the case." In spite of this good start, rosin-weed did not have any better fortune with the homoeopaths than with the eclectics. It never got into the text books. After transient popularity in the journals, it sank back into obscurity and has remained as a remedy for asthma in the memory of a few of the older practitioners from whom it is occasionally handed on by oral tradition. It was in 1872 when rosin-weed was enjoying its brief publicity and when the epidemic of epizoötic among the horses created a public interest in veterinary medicines, that my father, Dr. Alexander H. Laidlaw, discovered its remarkable curative power in hay fever, as related in Chapter II. =Rosin-Weed among the "Allopaths."= Rosin-weed never got into the Pharmacopoeia but it is none the worse for that. More people have been poisoned by the drugs inside of the Pharmacopoeia than by those outside of it. Except the few comments by western and southern medical journals, it was practically unknown in the dominant school, as shown by there being only one reference to it in the Index Catalogue. This is an article by Dr. Q. J. M. Goss, of Marietta, Georgia, in the _Nashville Journal of Medicine_, 1887, xx, page 60, in which Dr. Goss praises rosin-weed highly for its power to cure catarrh of the mucous membranes, comparing it to the balsams, cubeb and turpentine, and relating the cure of two cases of asthma. In the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine, there is a thin pamphlet by Dr. Goss, entitled _New Medicines_, which I suspect to be taken chiefly from Dr. Hale's _New Remedies_, in which he says of silphium laciniatum, "It has proved for me one of the best remedies in humid asthma. I have made several brilliant cures with the tincture of this plant and the tincture of ptelea trifoliata in doses of 30 drops each four times a day in simple elixir.... In acute diseases of the mucous membranes, the dose should be small, 5 to 10 drops; but in chronic inflammation, the dose may be 30 drops of the saturated tincture. It is a valuable remedy in chronic bronchitis and tracheitis. It will soon become a popular remedy in mucous diseases." This prophecy of popularity was scarcely borne out; for, with the exception of the article by him in 1887, rosin-weed drops out of sight and is found in no books published in the last forty years.