HENBANE 189 



asthma. A prescription that has been well commended 

 for the relief of this distressing ailment is a mixture in 

 equal parts of powdered lobelia, stramonium leaves, nitrate 

 of potash, and black tea. This being well mixed and 

 sifted must be placed in a saucer and ignited, the invalid 

 inhaling the resulting smoke. 



HENBANE (Hyoscyamus Niger) 



A plant equally dangerous, and growing in the same 

 sort of places as the thorn apple, is the Henbane. It 

 thrives especially upon chalk or sand, and appears to be 

 especially partial to the neighbourhood of the sea. We 

 have found it, for instance, on the chalk downs at the back 

 of Brighton, and came across a particularly fine plant of it 

 in the front garden of an empty house along the sea front 

 at Worthing. It claims a place in our regard in these 

 present pages from the curious nature of its fruit. 



The stem of the henbane is from one to three feet 

 high, a good deal branching, and rather thickly clothed 

 with clasping leaves. These are of a pale dull green, what 

 our ancestors would describe as sad-coloured, covered with 

 soft hairs, malodorous. The whole plant is covered with 

 foetid, glandular, viscid hairs, and is generally uncanny and 

 unwholesome-looking. Culpeper, we see, assigns it to 

 Saturn. ' 



To our ancestors the influence of the stars on human 



1 Much of superstition was imported into plant-study in earlier days, and 

 one of the forms it took was a belief in the influence of the stars upon 

 plants. Such a plant as the henbane, we see, was deemed saturnine ; 

 hellebore again " is an herb of Saturn, and therefore no marvel if it has some 

 sullen conditions with it." Many other plants were under the same malign 

 influence, while others were under the dominion of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and 



