Elixir of Hips

The hip harvest was bountiful in Scotland last autumn--134,000,000 hips weighing 200 tons were gathered before the Ministry of Health cried halt and further tons of hips were collected in England, so that this spring British druggists are marketing 600,000 bottles of hip syrup. Hips* are the soft scarlet, hairy fruit of the rose.

Boy scouts and women's services were sent on their finger-pricking harvest when British chemists found that rose hips are an absurdly rich source of vitamin C--400% richer than oranges (now rare as mangoes in Britain) and 300% richer than black currants (C-richest cultivated fruit). All this was reported in copies of Monthly Science News recently arrived in the U.S. from England.

Following antique herbals, many housewives concocted their own elixir of hips. Widespread result: they found themselves not only spooning out vitamin C to their bairns, but, as corks popped in pantries, indulging in a potent homebrew. Amused but impressed, one British medical journal observed: "We may even see hip syrup competing with orange juice after the war."

*From the Anglo-Saxon word for bramblebush, lieope.

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