Black Horehound.
Botanical name:
Ballote.
A common wild plant of a disagreeable smell, thence also called by some stinking horehound. The stalks are square, the leaves grow two at every joint, and are broad, short, and of a blackish green colour, but in shape not unlike those of the white kind. The flowers stand in clusters round the stalk at the joints, as in the other, but they are red. The whole plant has a dismal aspect. The root is fibrous.
The plant is to be used fresh and dried, and it has more virtue than most imagine. It is to be given in the form of tea: it promotes the menses, and is superior to most things as a remedy in hysteric cases, faintings, convulsions, and low-spiritedness, and all the train of those disorders.
