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SECACUL

Volume 19 · 95 words · 1815 Edition

in the Materia Medica of the ancients, a name given by Avicenna, Serapion, and others, to a root which was like ginger, and was brought from the East Indies, and used as a provocative to venery. The interpreters of their works have rendered this word iringo; and hence some have supposed that our eryngium or eryngo was the root meant by it: but this does not appear to be the case on a first inquiry, and there is some reason to believe that the famous root, at this time called ginfeng, was what they meant.