36 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



But an overdose produces the less cheering symptoms of 

 syncope and convulsions, followed by death. 



Some of the older writers, as Parkinson and Gerarde, re- 

 garding matters from a more purely medical point of view 

 than their successors, call the green hellebore the bastard 

 black hellebore, or the wild black hellebore, while Fuchs 

 names it pseudo-helleborus. Gerarde says it is " good for 

 mad and furious persons ; for melancholy, dull, and heavy 

 men ; for those that are troubled with the falling sickness ; 

 for lepers; for them that are sicke of a quartane ague; and 

 briefly, for all those that are troubled with black choler and 

 molested with melancholy/' He gives various ways of 

 administering it, one being " the leaves dried in an oven 

 after the bread is drawne out, and the powder thereof taken 

 in a figge or raisin, or strawed upon a piece of bread spred 

 with honey." Bad as an attack of the melancholy may 

 have been, the remedy would appear to have been almost 



