70 THE WILD-FLOWERS OF SELBORNE 



nettles, and gorgeous foxgloves from which the deadly 

 drug digitalis is extracted. Scattered along the lonely 

 waste are plants of the black mullein, and the stinking 

 black horehound, while trailing over the dry and 

 naked soil will be seen in wonderful abundance the 

 cucumber-like stems of the common or red-berried 

 bryony. This again is a plant of ill-repute, and has 

 played a conspicuous part among quacks and herbalists. 

 The roots are often of immense size, and Will Coles in 

 his Art of Simpling tells us that " witches take the 

 roots of bryony, which simple folks take for the true 

 mandrake, and make thereof an ugly image by which 

 they represent the person on whom they intend to 

 exercise their witchcraft." Gerarde relates that " the 

 Queen's chiefe Surgion, Mr. William Godorous, a very 

 curious and learned gentleman, shewed me a root 

 herof that waied half a hundred weight, and of the 

 bignes of a child of a yeare old." The berries, which 

 are of a dull scarlet colour and grow in small clus- 

 ters, are highly poisonous, and withal of a most fetid 

 and sickening odour. Indeed, wrote a distinguished 

 botanist, who visited the Warren some fifty years ago, 

 " the smell on a hot summer's day from such a 

 multitude of ill-favoured weeds is far from refreshing, 

 and quite overpowers the fragrant honeysuckle, the 

 only sweet and innocent thing that lives to throw a 

 charm over what is else but dead, dreary, and baleful." 

 We have not by any means exhausted the number 

 of species of British plants which may be regarded as 

 dangerous. Many members both of the Daffodil and 

 the Lily families, including such beautiful species as 

 the Narcissus, the snowflake, the fritillary, the autumn 

 crocus, the lily of the valley, contain harmful properties 

 in their bulbs ; but instances of poisoning by these 



