The WILD or FALSE SARSAPARILLA (A. nudicaulis), so common in woods, hillsides, and thickets, shelters its three spreading umbels of greenish-white flowers in May and June beneath a canopy formed by a large, solitary, compound leaf. The aromatic roots, which run horizontally sometimes three feet or more through the soil, send up a very short, smooth proper stem which lifts a tall leafstalk and a shorter, naked flower stalk. The single large leaf, of exquisite bronzy tints when young, is compounded of from three to five oval, toothed leaflets on each of its three divisions. The tiny five-parted flowers have their petals curved backward over the calyx to make their refreshments more accessible for the flies, on which they chiefly rely for aid in producing those close clusters of dark-purple berries on which migrating birds feast in early autumn. By these agents the plant has been distributed from Newfoundland to the Carolinas, westward from Manitoba to Missouri, which is not surprising when we remember that certain birds travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes in a single night. While the true sarsaparilla of medicine should come from a quite different herb that flourishes in Mexico and South America, this one furnishes a commercial substitute enormously used as a blood purifier and cooling summer drink. Burrowing rabbits delight to nibble the long, slender, fragrant roots. The GINSENG (Panax quinquefolium; Aralia quinquefolia of Gray) found in rich woods from Quebec to Alabama, and westward to Nebraska - that is, where found at all, for much hunting has all but exterminated it in many regions - bears a solitary umbel of small yellowish-green, five-parted, polygamous flowers in July and August at the end of a smooth stem about a foot high. Bright crimson berries follow the clusters on the female plants in early autumn. Three long-petioled leaves, which grow in a whorl at the top of the low stem, are palmately divided into five thin, ovate, pointed, and irregularly toothed leaflets. But it is the deep fusiform root, simple or branched, about which the Americanized Chinese, at least, are most concerned. For centuries Chinese physicians have ascribed miraculous virtues to the Manchurian ginseng. Not only can it remove fatigue and restore lost powers, but by its use veterans became frisky youths again according to these wise men of the East. In short, they consider it the panacea for all ills (Panax: pan = all, akos = remedy) - the source of immortality. Naturally the roots were and are in great demand, especially such as branch so as to resemble the human form. (Both the Chinese name Schin-sen, and Garan-toguen, the Indian one, are said to mean like a man. Here is an interesting clue for the ethnologists to follow !) Imperial edict prohibited the Chinese from digging up their native plant lest it be exterminated. So Jesuit missionaries, who discovered our similar ginseng, were not slow in exporting it to China when it was