ABSTRACT:
Plants used in traditional medicine have stood up to the test of time and contributed many novel compounds for preventive and curative medicine to modern science. India is sitting on a gold mine of well recorded and traditionally well practiced knowledge of herbal medicine. The present study deals with pharmacognostic, preliminary phytochemical investigation of Achyranthes aspera belonging to family Amaranthaceae. In this, pharmacognostical studies are concerned for the determination of physicochemical parameters like ash values, extractive values, and loss on drying fluorescence analysis .The leaves were subjected to successive soxhlation using petroleum ether, ethyl acetate, alcohol and water. The extracts thus obtained were studied for preliminary phytochemical investigation for detection of presence of various chemical constituents like alkaloids, glycosides, steroids, tannins, saponins, fats and oils, flavonoids etc.