236 BOMBAY: NATURAL HISTORY SOCTETY. 
locha, does not produce Aloewood, but the herbalists obtain the dry 
inert suber from old trees, and sell it as a strengthening medicine 
under the name of Tejbal. The poisonous principle contained in 
the juice has not been properly examined, but it is probably an 
acrid resin like that from gum euphorbium, which is well known as 
a blistering agent. 
The genus Huphorbia is a very large one, and most of the plants 
are remarkable for a milky poisonous juice which makes them 
obnoxious to animals. Thus in Guzarat we see the hedges made of 
the Huphortia Tirucalli or milk bush, which though a fragile, 
smooth plant, so abounds in milky poisonous juice, that cattle will 
not break through it. Huphorbia neriifolia, another hedge plant, 
yields a similar juice, and it is also protected by thorns; others 
of the genus have the same properties, The poisonous principle 
of such of. the Huphorbias as have been examined chemically 
appears to be identical, and the same as that of the drug Euphor- 
bium. They also agree in yielding to analysis, a crystalline 
substance, called KHuphorbon. The Ricinus, or castor-oil plant, 
which is such a common weed here, protects its oily . seeds from 
destruction by a powerful toxic principle quite distinct from the 
purgative oil with which we are all so well acquainted. These 
seeds have in Hurope often proved fatal to children, even when 
very few have been eaten. Dr. Stillmark has recently discovered 
in them an albumenoid body which he has named ricin, and which 
produces the most violent inflammation of the gastro-intestinal 
tract in men and animals. A dose of six milligrams of rivin, which 
would be contained in about ten seeds, would be sufficient to kill 
an adult man. The results obtained by the experiments of Dr, 
Stillmark are confirmed by experience, for we find that when 
children eat the seeds which are scattered on the wharf during 
the discharge of cargo in Hurope, they suffer from severe vomiting 
and prostration, but not from catharsis. Croton seeds owe their 
immunity from the attacks of insects to the presence of crotonoleic 
acid, the most violent cathartic known. 
Nerium odorum, the sweet-scented oleander belonging to the 
Apocynex, is a most poisonous plant, and is never eaten by animals. 
Its Sanskrit name Asvamaraka, or horse-killer, shows that its 
properties have long been known’ in India; and De Gubernatis 
informs us in his Mythologie des Plantes, IT., 257, that the closely 
allied plant Nerium Oleander of: Hurope is called in Italy ammazza 
