THE POISONOUS PLANTS OF BOMBAY. 228 
An insipid gum of brown colour exudes from wounds in the bark of 
fT. belleriea, in vermicular pieces, about the thickness of the 
finger. “ It is hardly at all soluble,” says Dr. Dymock, “ in water, 
in which it swells up and forms a bulky gelatinous mass.” Rox- 
burgh’s statement, that the gum is soluble in water, is nearer the truth. 
I have verified it myself and have just at this minute a specimen of 
the gum in water, and I find it is as easily soluble as the ordinary gum 
arabic, Dr. Dymock was not able to verify from personal observa- 
tion the statement of Drury that the gum burns like a candle. From 
my own experience I can say that it does burn and continues to burn 
with a pale reddish flame, and with a spurt and a flash now and then, 
swelling the whole mass out and leaving a charred residue. I have 
tried the experiment just this minute on a fresh’ bit of gum obtained 
from a bark wounded only yesterday, Perhaps Dr. Dymock’s speci- 
men of gum was old and dry, and had got rid of its inflammable 
material in the process of drying, as is but natural to suppose. 
Wight and Arnott observe in their Prodromus that “the tree 
known as Terminalia moluccana of Roxburgh and probably of Blume 
(but not of Lamarck) is allied to T. bellerica. It has precisely the 
same kind of fruit and male flowers, but the petioles are short, giving 
quite a different aspect to the plant.” | 
The flowers of 7. bellerica are of offensive odour as I have 
already stated above. I have alluded to an incident at Thana regard- 
ing this offensive odour in a Lecture on Indian Flowers I delivered 
last year before the Sassoon Mechanics Institute of Bombay. Extracts 
from this Lecture have already appeared in the last number of the 
Society’s Journal wherein the incident is mentioned. I need not 
therefore repeat it here. 
THE POISONOUS PROPERTIES. 
The kernel of the seed of Behedd is narcotic in its action. Dr, 
Lyon refers in his Medical Jurisprudence (p. 222) to two sets of cases 
of accidental poisoning by it. One set of cases he quotes from Dr. 
Norman Chevers’ Medical Jurisprudence as recorded by Mr. C, EF. 
Raddock, Sub-Assistant Surgeon of the Malwa Bheel Corps, wherein 
three boys are mentioned as having suffered from poisonous symptoms 
after eating some of the dry nuts. They all recovered however. 
The symptoms in two of the boys were drowsiness, headache, sickness 
