356 
Japanese  Belladonna. 
f  Am.  Jour.  Pharmt. 
\       July,  1880. 
Ions  of  water  as  the  proportion  most  likely  to  give  general  satisfaction' 
by  effectually  destroying  the  worms  without  injuring  the  plants. 
All  that  has  been  said  under  the  head  of  Paris  green  as  to  the  desir- 
ability of  adding  a  small  quantity  of  flour  or  other  substance  to  give 
adhesiveness  to  the  liquid  will  hold  equally  true  of  London  purple,  but 
the  latter  has  in  many  respects  a  great  advantage  over  the  former,, 
especially  in  its  greater  cheapness. 
London  purple  has  this  farther  advantage  over  other  arsenical  com-' 
pounds  hitherto  employed  :  Its  finely-pulverized  condition  seems  to- 
give  it  such  penetrating  power  that,  when  used  in  liquid,  it  tints  the 
leaves  so  that  cotton  treated  with  it  is  readily  distinguished  at  a  dis- 
tance, the  general  effect  being  quite  marked  as  compared  with  any  of 
the  other  poisons  similarly  applied.  It  seems  also  to  be  more  effectu- 
ally absorbed  into  the  substance  of  the  leaf,  and  is  therefore  more  per- 
sistent. At  the  same  time  experience  shows  that  it  does  not  injurethe 
squares  any  more  than  Paris  green. 
JAPANESE  BELLADONNA. 
By  E.  M.  Holmes,  F.L.S. 
Curator  of  the  Museum  of  the  Phai maceutical  Society. 
In  January  last  I  received  from  Professor  FlUkiger,  of  Strassburg,  a 
specimen  of  a  root  labeled  '^Japanese  belladonna,"  and  which,  in  his 
opinion,  'Seemed  to  contain  atropia." 
The  root  was  totally  different  in  character  to  true  belladonna;  but^ 
having  at  that  time  no  clue  to  its  botanical  source,  I  put  it  on  one  side: 
for  future  investigation. 
My  attention  was  again  called  to  this  belladonna  root  by  a  sample- 
received  a  few  (lays  ago  from  Messrs.  Hearon,  Squire  and  Francis,  who- 
informed  me  that  it  was  offered  at  a  drug  sale  in  London  early  this 
month,  but  that  no  one  bid  for  it. 
Just  at  this  time  I  had  occasion  to  refer  to  a  figure  of  Scopolia  carnio- 
Uca^  Jacq.,^  and  was  struck  by  the  remarkable  resemblance  between 
the  root  of  this  plant,  as  figured  by  Jacquin,  and  the  Japanese 
belladonna. 
On  turning  to  the  recently  published  work  by  Franchet  and  Savatier 
on  Japanese  plants,  I  found  that  an  allied  species,  S.  japonica^  Max., 
occurs  in  Japan,  and  that  no  other  solanaceous  plant  there  described. 
^Jacquin,  "  Obs.  Bot.,"  p.  20. 
