344 Keegan : The Chemistry of Some Common Plafits. 



about o'2 per cent, of an alkaloid called ulexine (cytisine) 

 C^-^H^^N^O, which in doses of o'l gram produces diuresis, and is 

 a nerv^e and muscle poison especially of the lungs. The gay and 

 brilliant flowers have a little volatile oil, wax, and fat, and 

 much tannoid allied to luteolin or quercitrin ; the orange pig- 

 ment is due to carotin enclosed in homogenous chromoplastids. 



Burdock. Arctium lappa. This biennial, of some four feet 

 or more in stature frequents specially waste, sequestered, and 

 lonesome places. The last house in a valley rising into mountain 

 solitude, or a lonesome, outlying barn may bear in their precincts 

 a patch of Burdocks entirely isolated, no other specimens occur- 

 ing perhaps for miles around. Belonging to the great order 

 Compositse, its chemical characteristics might be, so to speak, 

 anticipated. The root is devoid of starch, but contains inulin, 

 sugar, mucilage, albumenoids, a glucosidal bitter principle, wax, 

 little resin, but more tannin than other parts of the plant, and 

 3*7 per cent, of ash. The huge lower leaves, grey and downy 

 below, are difficult to tackle, but a few other leaves, from five to 

 twelve inches in length, were analysed and found to contain 

 not much starch or sugar, but a great quantity of resin and 

 mucilage, with some fat oil, 2 to 3 per cent, tannin, a small 

 quantity of an extremely nauseous bitter principle in the form of 

 a resinous glucoside (cuicin), and i3'2 per cent, ash in dry, 

 which had 55-4 per cent, soluble salts, 14-2 lime, 2-5 P^O^ and 

 SO^, and 5*8 chlorine. The fruit contains 15*4 per cent, drying 

 oil, 5 "5 resins, and a little cuicin. No nitrate reaction was 

 yielded by the petioles of the larger leaves, whose size and 

 vigorous dimensions are connected with the eminent capacity of 

 the comparatively copious parenchyma of the adventive roots 

 for the storage of reserve-substances, which (especially inulin) 

 provide a specially stimulating pabulum of respiratory material 

 incident to rapid and, as it were, tropical outgrowth. 



Cuckoo-Pint. Arum maculatum. This quaint plant is one 

 of the earliest to awake from winter sleep, as it were, and ere 

 the meadows begin to be reclad with vernal vesture its clumps of 

 pronounced green foliage rise from solitary waste lands by road 

 and field side. The chemistry of this plant has been forced into 

 notice by reason of its quondam extensive employment in phar- 

 macy. It contains in all parts (especially in the corm) a glucoside- 

 having all the general properties of saponin, and is a poison 

 similar to but feebler than the sapotoxins in scarcely acting on 

 the heart and not destroying the irritability of nerve and muscle. 

 It contains also another poison, viz., a very volatile brown 



Naturalist, 



