in botany, a species of the Rumex, which grows in pastures and meadows, and is well known. The natives of Lapland boil large quantities of the leaves in water, and mix the juice when cold with the milk of their rein-deers which they esteem an agreeable and wholesome food. The Dutch are said to cultivate this plant for its usefulness in the dyeing of woollen cloths black; and we know that by means of the common broad-leaved sorrel an excellent black colour is, in many places of Scotland, given to woollen stuffs without the aid of copperas. As this mode of dyeing does not in the smallest degree injure the texture of the cloth, which continues to the last soft and silky, without that hardness to the touch which it acquires when dyed black by means of copperas, our readers will probably thank us for the following receipt, with which we have been favoured by a learned physician:

Let the stuff to be dyed be well washed with soap and water, and afterwards completely dried. Then of the common broad-leaved sorrel boil as much as shall make an acid decoction of sufficient quantity to let the stuff to be dyed lie in it open and easy to be stirred. The greater quantity of sorrel that is used, the better will the colour be; and therefore if the pot or cauldron will not hold enough at once, when part has been sufficiently boiled, it must be taken out and wrung, and a fresh quantity be boiled in the same juice or decoction. When the liquor is made sufficiently acid, strain it from the sorrel through a sieve, put the cloth or yarn into it, and let it boil for two hours, stirring it frequently. If stockings be among the stuff to be dyed, it will be expedient, after they have been an hour in the boiling liquor, to turn them inside out, and at the end of the second hour let the whole be poured into a tub or any other vessel. The pot or cauldron must then be washed, and water put into it, with half a pound of logwood chips for every pound of dry yarn or cloth. The logwood and water should boil slowly for four hours; and then the cloth or yarn being wrung from the sour liquor, and put into the logwood decoction, the whole must be suffered to boil slowly for four hours, stockings, if there be any, being turned inside out at the end of two hours. Of this last decoction there must as of the former be enough to let the cloth lie open and easy to be stirred while boiling. At the end of the four hours the cloth must be taken out, and among the boiling liquor, first removed from the fire, must be poured a Scotch pint or English gallon of stale urine for every pound of dry cloth or other stuff to be dyed. When this compound liquor has been stirred and become cold, the cloth must be put into it and suffered to remain well covered for 12 hours, and then dried in the shade; after which, to divest it of smell or any other impurity, it may be washed in cold water, and dried for use.

Wood-Sorrel, in botany. See Oxalis.

SORREL-Colour, in the manege, is a reddish colour, generally thought to be a sign of a good horse.