PURPOSE OF THE INVESTIGATION OF WILD AROMATIC PLANTS NATIVE TO THE UNITED STATES.

Since many valuable volatile oils and volatile-oil constituents have been discovered in plants growing wild in various parts of the world, it has been thought that an investigation of the wild aromatic plants of this country would reveal many, now practically useless and possibly classed as weeds, which might become of commercial value.

The economic value of these plants is determined not only by the proportion of oil which they contain, but by the constituents of the oil; hence careful analyses must be made in order to discover what these constituents may be. The present bulletin deals with the analyses of three heretofore unutilized plants, which may be grouped together, because the oils obtained from them are all of a camphoraceous character and because they contain several constituents in common. These, gathered from different sections of the United States from entirely different habitats and belonging to unrelated families, are as follows: Black sage (Ramona stachyoides) from California, wild sage (Artemisia frigida) from South Dakota, and swamp bay (Persea pubescens) from Florida.