307 
The poison given by the mouth acts with less vigour; when it is injected into 
the intestines the results are more certain. The animal has a longer stage of excitement, 
the convulsive fit is not so severe, and recovery is more certain. Torpidity remains for 
some hours. 
A quarter oi a drop injected under the skin of a rat causes excitement; the 
animal starts with slight noises, may fall over a few times from very strong muscular 
irregularities; remains excitable for some time, then gradually becomes torpid. 
In' small ftiecflcaf doses we may expect to find the period of the excitement and 
the torpidity to be the only marked symptoms. In cats ancf dogs the excfterrtent is 
not marked, but vomiting of a violent kind occurs. 
Dr. George Bennett, of Sydney, has some notes on the drug in the N.S.W. 
Medical Gazette, iii, 8 May, 1873. His pituri was obtained from the same source as that 
used by Dr. Bancroft, but was in a damaged condition. 
See also Dr. J. M. Petrie's bibliography of pituri in Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S.W., 
xlii, 133 (1917). 
Habitat. Interior of all the States except Tasmania and Victoria ; in other 
words, from the Darling and Barcoo Rivers to Western Australia. 
Mr. Sylvester Browne, in a letter in the Queenslander early in 1880, quoted 
by Dr. Bancroft, ridicules the reports as to the scarcity of the plant, and states that 
" it grows on the ridges of high spinifex sand-hills, and which sand-hills contain many 
cool springs and lakes, which will hold Water much better than the fabulous stories 
told of pituri." 
Two pituri bags obtained by me for the Technological Museum were obtained 
the one from Mount Margaret station, Wilson River, south-west Queensland, to which 
place it had been brought by the blacks from the Herbert River ; th other afeo from 
the Herbert River, lat. 23 S., long. 139 E., near the Pituri Creek. In neither ca'se 
can more precise localities of the place from which the Pituri was procured be obtained, 
perhaps partly because the blacks do not wish the locality to become generally known 
and partly because the packages have passed through so many hands. 
Most of the material -used! by physiologists antf Garters' comS from Western 
Queensland. The late Mr. Sylvester Browne told me that there is' rio pituri east of 
the Mulligan. There is a patch about 60 miles north and? south', and', say, 20 miles 
east and west, between the Mulligan and the border. 
The following valuable account of the distribution is from the pen of Dr. Roth : 
" Tho supply for the Boulia district is obtained in the neighbourhood of Carlo (vd Mungerebar), on 
the Upper Mulligan. As a matter of fact, the plant grows further eastward than this, though in scattered 
patches only, e.g., about 16 miles westwards of Glenormiston head station; a patch of it was also said 
(in 1895) by the Mai-takudi aboriginals to be growing in one of the gullies at Clon-jurry 011 the Rifle Mountain 
where the old target-range used to be. According to notes taken about the same time from Boulia and 
Marion Down's, from Herbert Downs and Roxburgh, messengers are sent direct to the Yuleolonya tribes 
