THE OTTAWA NATURALIST 



VOL. XXIX. OCTOBER, 1915 No. 7 



THE DANGERS OF OUR WILDS. 



By Charles Macnamara, Arnprior, Ont. 



The French traveller, lately returned from Algeria, was 

 frankly joking when he told an enquirer that the most dangerous 

 animal in North Africa was not the lion, as generally supposed, 

 but the gazelle. "The lion," he said, "it never molests you. 

 But the gazelle, when you are riding across the plain, suddenly 

 springs up at your horse's nose; your horse shies, and throws 

 you off and you break your neck." While this was admittedly 

 a pleasantry on the part of the traveller, a consideration of the 

 dangers of our native woods leads to a conclusion almost as 

 surprising. 



In the first place, the only real menace to human life comes, 

 not from the animals of our forests, but from the plants. Our 

 woods and fields harbour a far larger number of poisonous plants 

 than is commonly suspected. Everyone knows of poison ivy 

 and the painful and annoying skin eruption it causes; but its 

 effects, however unpleasant while they last, very rarely result 

 in any serious or permanent injury. Much more grave are the 

 consequences of the internal poisonings by plants which attract 

 by their succulent roots or bright-coloured berries. To men- 

 tion only a very few of the commonest of these, the sweet roots 

 of the hemlocks, Conium maculatum and Circuta maculata, are 

 most deadly, and the rash partaker seldom recovers. Another 

 plant with a bad record is Indian tobacco, Lobelia infiata, which 

 grows plentifully in dry fields. Although it has a strong and 

 disagreeable taste, children, misled by the common name, 

 sometimes chew this weed with fatal results. The bright red 

 pulp enclosing the seeds of the yew, Taxus bacota, found all 

 through our woods, is probably harmless enough in itself, but 

 the seeds are very poisonous. The vivid colour of the "berries" 

 makes them attractive to children, and a good many young 

 lives have been sacrificed to them. 



But the fungi of the genus Amanita have more deaths 

 against them than all the rest of our flora put together. Never 

 a season passes without one or more records of persons fatally 



