HEMLOCK 183 



Shelley used the name Cowbind 



" And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, 

 Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May ". 



The name Cow's Lick is clue to small quantities of it having been 

 given to horses in their corn to make their coats glossy, and for horned 

 cattle. Coles says of the name Mandrake, " The root sometimes 

 groweth to the highnesse of a childe of a yeere old, so that it hath 

 been by some cut into the form of a man and called a mandrake, 

 being set again into the earth". 



Lupton describes how men made the counterfeit mandrake. 

 Gerarde also exposes this common fraud. Coles also says they 

 " make thereof an ugly image by which they represent the person on 

 whom they intend to exercise their witchcraft". It was called Devil's 

 Cherry. It was trained to grow into shapes and used as charms. 

 In Chaucer's day it was used to cure leprosy. Its juice was used 

 in Dwale. The root sold for Mandragora is poisonous and acrid. 

 It is powerfully cathartic. The red berries used for dyeing are 

 poisonous. 



ESSENTIAL SPECIFIC CHARACTERS: 



121. Bryonia dioica, Jacq. Stem climbing, angled, tendrils simple, 

 leaves palmate, 5-lobed, rough, plants dioecious, white with evergreen 

 veins, staminate, in a corymb, pistillate in umbels, berries scarlet, 

 globose. 



Hemlock (Conium maculatum, L.) 



Hemlock, in spite of its poisonous nature, is widely distributed, 

 being found (to-day) throughout the North Temperate Zone, in 

 Europe, N. Africa, Siberia, and it has been introduced in N. America. 

 It is general in Great Britain, but is not found in Cardigan, S.E. Yorks, 

 Main Argyle, Mid and N. Ebucles, W. Ross, E. Ross, Shetlands. In 

 Yorks it ascends to nearly 1000 ft. 



It is a moisture-loving plant, usually growing by the sides of streams 

 and rivers, or away from such spots along the roadside, occasionally out- 

 side outhouses, and very rarely on the borders of cornfields. Its present 

 distribution may be partly artificial owing to its poisonous properties, 

 its ill effects leading in some instances to extermination. Cattle generally 

 avoid it. As is well known poisonous plants have usually some warning 

 signals which enable animals to avoid them, and in this case the foetid 

 smell is accompanied by a purple spotting of the stem (at once a sus- 

 picious novelty), which is further covered with a blue powder. 



