--"Cette plante a la racine fort petite,
et enveloppee de fibres noires, fort deliees; sa tige est d'un pourpre
fonce, et s'eleve en quelques endroits a trois ou quatre pieds de haut;
il en sort des branches, qui se courbent en tous sens. Les feuilles sont
plus larges que celles de notre Capillaire de France, d'un beau verd
d'un cote, et de l'autre, semees de petits points obscurs; nulle part
ailleurs cette plante n'est si haute ni si vive, qu'en Canada. Elle n'a
aucune odeur tandis qu'elle est sur pied, mais quand elle a ete
renfermee, elle repand une odeur de violette, qui embaume. Sa qualite
est aussi beaucoup au-dessus de tous les autres capillaires."

The Herba capillaris is the Adiantum pedatum of Linnaeus (Sp. Pl., p.
1557). Cornutus, in his _Canadens. Plant. Historia_, p. 7, calls it
Adiantum Americanum, and gives a figure of it, p. 6. Kalm says that "it
grows in all the British colonies of America, and likewise in the
southern parts of Canada, but I never found it near Quebec. It grows in
the woods in shady places, and in a good soil. Several people in Albany
and Canada assured me that its leaves were very much used instead of tea
in consumptions, coughs, and all kinds of pectoral diseases. This they
have learned from the Indians, who have made use of it for these
purposes from time immemorial. This American maiden-hair is reckoned
preferable in surgery to that which we have in Europe, and therefore
they send a great quantity of it to France every year. Commonly the
price at Quebec is between five and fifteen sols a pound. The Indians
went into the woods about this time (August), and traveled far above
Montreal in quest of this plant."--Kalm, in Pinkerton, vol. xiii., p.
641.]

[Footnote 178: "This moss is called by the Canadian voyageurs, _Tripe de
Roche_; it belongs to the order Gyrophara. They who have perused the
affecting narrative of the sufferings of Captain Franklin and his
gallant party, on their return from their first journey to the Arctic
Sea, will remember that it was on _Tripe de Roche_ that they depended,
under God, for their very existence. 'We looked,' says Captain Franklin,
'with humble confidence to the Great Author and giver of all good, for a
continuance of the support which had been hitherto always supplied to us
at our greatest need,' and he was not disappointed."--Murray's _Canada_,
vol. iii., p. 330. "Parmi les sauvages errans, et qui ne cultivent point
du tout la terre, lorsque la cha