Page:Indian Medicinal Plants (Text Part 2).djvu/581

converging within the margin. Spathe white, obliquely campanulate, ½in. long, alternately gibbous or tubular and closed below, contracted about the middle, dilated and nearly circular above, tubular below. Spadix adnate to the back of the tube of the spathe, free above. Male inflorescence of few sessile connate. Stamens beneath the apex of spadix, slits vertical, with a ring or confluent minute neuters below them. Female inflorescence a solitary conico-ovoid, 1-celled ovary. Style conical, stigma discoid ; ovules many, or thotropous, basal or subparietal. Fruit membranous, few-seeded. Seeds oblong or obovoid, albuminous, testa at length rugose ; embryo minute, apical, cuneiform.

The leaves are connected together into a rose-shaped tuft, and these send out runners bearing other plants in all stages of growth.

The flowers, or inflorescence, are nestled at the base of the leaf, and it may easily be seen there, by some of the young unfolded leaves, that the spathe which encloses the flowers is nothing but a modified leaf, the lower sides involute, and bearing the stamens and pistil.

The roots descend loose into the water, with no necessary attachment to soil or mud, and are long and feathery.

In tropical countries it is most abundant in all the ponds of water preserved for public use, and keeps the water always fresh and cool, which would be greatly subject to putrefaction and charged with a multitude of insects, had they continued exposed to the heat of the sun. The plant, however, is there considered acrid, and when the droughts set in and the waters are reduced very low, they are overheated and so impregnated with the particles of this vegetable, that they occasion bloody fluxes to such as are obliged to use them at those seasons. (Curtis' Botanical Magazine for February 1st, 1851.)

Uses : — The plant is cooling and demulcent, and is given in dysuria. The leaves are made into poultices and applied to hæmorrhoids. Mixed with rice and cocoanut milk they are given in dysentery, and with rose-water and sugar in cough and asthma. The root is laxative and emollient. (Rheede ; Ainslie ; Voight.)

Captain W. 0. Swanston, in a letter dated Camp at Tanjore, 2nd July, 1863, to the Assistant Inspector-General, Madras Police, wrote that the plant destroyed most effectually the bugs that invested the Tanjore jail.

" The plant is just put down close to the walls in the floor, and its smell apparently has the effect of enticing the bug to it,