PRODUCTION OF ERGOT IN WHEAT, RYE, ETC. 269 
swallow it they soon sickened, their limbs became inflamed, 
and their bodies gangrenous in various parts, and sometimes 
the flesh sloughed off, and death ensued. A duck was 
forcibly fed with it mixed with other flour, the effect of 
which was, that black blood oozed from the nostrils in five 
days, the tongue rotted off, the beak changed colour, and 
the animal died in ten days. A turkey died in twenty days, 
and showed symptoms of disease in seven days. A pig died 
in twenty-three days, having eaten 1| lb. of the ergotted 
grain. Another pig was experimented on who had one- 
eighth of its food so diseased ; this animal lived on it for two 
months, the effects were that the joints of the legs became 
gangrenous as w T ell as 'the ears, and the flesh from the tail 
sloughed off. The importance and propriety of making these 
experiments will be readily seen, when I show the effects on 
a whole family in Suffolk; and particularly when it is known 
that they were undertaken expressly to test the probability of 
ergotted rye bread being the cause of dangerous gangrenous 
epidemics among the poor in certain districts of France. In 
many parts of that country there are extensive tracts of sand 
that are occasionally inundated by the flooding of their great 
rivers : on these sands the rye is very much grown. The 
ergotted grains are now picked out, and sold as an article 
of commerce, and may be had at druggists’ shops. 
A case is recorded by Tessier, a French M.D., that a poor 
man, whose family were in a state of starvation, ventured to 
make bread of some ergotted rye, which he had begged of 
a farmer, but had been cautioned against using it. It 
killed himself, his wife, and five out of his seven children. 
Of the two which recovered from the effects of the ergot, one 
became deaf and dumb, and the other had one of his legs 
slough off. 
It may be remarked that these casualties relate to a 
disease in the rye, and that we have yet to learn if the 
ergotted grains in wheat, would have such a powerful effect 
as has been described above. 
In the second volume of the c Royal Agricultural Journal/ 
Professor Henslow has given the particulars of a whole family 
having been poisoned from a similar cause in the year 1762; 
recorded on a tablet, let into the church wall, at Wattisham, 
in Suffolk. — John Weathersett, the father, was attacked 
three weeks after his family, his hands becoming benumbed, 
contracted, and black, the nails came off; he complained of 
darting pains in his hands, arms, legs, and back. Of the 
mother, both her feet came off at the ankles, and the flesh 
rotted from the leg-bones, which continued bare for three 
