LAEKSPUR POISONING OF LIVE STOCK. 3 
It is in North America that practically all the losses of domestic 
animals from this plant have occurred, and even here the published 
records are brief and of comparatively recent date. Complaints of 
losses came, by letter, to the United States Department of Agricul- 
culture many years ago, and newspaper reports of losses have not 
been uncommon. Philip Miller, in 1760, says of a larkspur, which 
must be Delphinium exaltatum Aiton : " This plant gTows naturally 
in most parts of North America, where, when the cattle happen to 
feed upon the leaves, it occasions great disorders in them." There 
seems to have been no other published statement of the poisoning of 
cattle until the paper by Aven Nelson, 1896, page 79, who said that 
Delphinium, geyeri Greene is " frequently greedily eaten by hungry 
cattle with fatal results, caused by bloating." Earlier, in 1889, 
Irish, page 25, reported the feeding of cattle upon larkspur with no 
results. Wilcox, in 1897, published his paper on the poisoning of 
sheep by larkspur, and this was republished in the Fifteenth Annual 
Eeport of the Bureau of Animal Industry, 1898. He says, pages 
39 to 43, that from a band of 2,000 yearling lambs, about 50 died 
and between 500 and 600 showed signs of sickness. Autopsies were 
made upon the dead animals, and in the stomach contents were found 
the stems, leaves, and roots of Delphinium menziesii D. C. 1 An ex- 
amination was made of the range over which the sheep had been 
passing and it was found that the larkspur grew in considerable 
abundance, and there was evidence that the sheep had been feeding 
almost exclusively where there was a large quantity of larkspur. 
Not only that, but it was clear that they had eaten freely of the 
plant. An examination showed that the plants broke off readily 
above the root and the inference was that the grazing had been 
largely of the upper part of the plant, very little of the root having 
been consumed. After a careful inspection of the other plants upon 
the range the conclusion was reached that there was no other plant 
which could be responsible for these cases. Wilcox sums up the 
results in the following words : 
Thus the post-mortem condition of the sheep, the finding of larkspur in the 
stomachs of the dead sheep, and the evidence from the field work that the 
larkspur had been eaten by them seemed to indicate conclusively that the 
larkspur was the cause of the trouble. 
He then gives in some detail the symptoms of larkspur poison- 
ing in sheep, which correspond very closely with the observations 
of other authors upon larkspur poisoning. In order to make the 
work more conclusive, extracts of larkspur were made upon the range 
of Mr. Vestal, at Bigtimber, Mont. The chloroform extract of 25 
grams of the dried plant was fed to a lamb, producing symptoms of 
1 This is probably incorrectly determined and should be DelpJiinium licolor. 
