30 JOURNAL, BOMB A Y NA TUBAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XIV. 



a gardener's eye is artistic. It appears from Loudon (op. cii), 

 that the ^Stramonium plant was known to the Greeks as the mad- 

 apple. It is not mentioned by Professor Daubeny in his Oxford 

 Lectures on the Trees and Shrubs of the Ancient Greeks and 

 Romans. 



POISONOUS PROPERTIES. 



All the species or their varieties hitherto known of the Datura genus 

 are decidedly poisonous. The purple or violet-coloured variety is 

 more deadly. All writers, European, American, or old Indian, are 

 ao-reed that every part of the plant is deleterious to human life. The 

 seeds are the most poisonous of all parts of the plant, wherever it 

 o-rows. A detailed description of the seed, therefore, may not be out 

 of place here. I give it on the authority of Dr. William Palmer 

 (Norman Chevei"s' Med. Jurisprudence for India, pp. 184 — 185, Cal- 

 cutta Ed., 1870). It runs thus: — The seed is almost kidney-shaped ; 

 its outline, angular ; its size is rather more than a quarter of an inch 

 lono-, and rather less in width ; its colour greenish-brown when fresh, 

 changing to yellow, I may add deep brown, when dry ; it is attached 

 to the placenta by a large white fleshy mass, which separates easily, 

 leaving a deep furrow along half the length of the concave border 

 of the seed ; the outer surface of the seed is scabrous, almost reti- 

 culate except on the two compressed sides, where it has become 

 almost glaucous from pressure of the neighbouring seeds ; the convex 

 "border of the seed is thick and bulged, with a longitudinal depres- 

 sion between the bulgings caused by the compression of the two 

 sides. When the seed is divided into two, by cutting with a knife 

 placed in the furrow on the convex border, the testa is seen irregular 

 and ano'ular in outline, and the embryo is curved and twisted in a 

 fleshy albumen. 



The active principle of the plant is an alkaloid once known as 

 Daturine. The seed contains it in larger proportions than any other 

 part of the plant weight for weight. The alkaloid was also known 

 at one time as Daturia. Sohn says that commercial Daturine is 

 frequently a mixture of Hyoscyamine and Atropine or the for- 

 mer solely. Datura stramonium, he says, also contains Stra- 

 monine which is an alkaloid like Hyoscyamine and Atropine, but 

 it is not bitter. Hyoscyamine has a sharp and disagreeable odour ; 



