78 VEGETABLE POISONS 



lated by the sunshine which everybody hopes is in 

 store for us, will be busy drawing material from the 

 soil, the atmosphere, the water, to be worked up in 

 their secret and intricate laboratories into essences 

 nutritive and beneficial to some organisms, neutral or 

 hurtful to others. How very little we know of the 

 process, still less of the reason for the effects of the 

 various products ! 



Take the common stinging nettle, referred to above 

 as the favourite food of so many caterpillars. The 

 stinging mechanism has been explained to us as con- 

 sisting of hair-like tubes, sharply pointed, each with a 

 bulbous reservoir at its base, filled with an acrid fluid 

 which, in some exotic species, is of deadly potency. 

 We conceal our ignorance of the real nature of this 

 fluid, and of the means of counteracting its effects, by 

 explaining to each other that its poisonous principle 

 is neither corrosive, nor gaseous, nor neurotic, but 

 irritant, which leaves the matter much as every village 

 child knows it. 



But how is this poison produced, and why ? Whence 

 is it distilled, and by what unerring process ? If it is 

 to protect itself, and not out of sheer cussedness that 

 the nettle stings, what does it seek protection from ? 

 Not, as we have seen, from caterpillars ; and if it is a 

 device to secure immunity from man, it is singularly ill 

 conceived, because, being a plant of some beauty of 

 foliage, its offensive properties only serve to bring upon 

 it persecution, which it might avoid if it were a more 

 amiable neighbour. And how comes it that the Dead 



