Dr. O'SLaughnessy, in Calcutta, clearly
established its identity with that of the nux
vomica tree.

True Angostura bark has a finer texture
than the other, is darker-coloured, aromatic,
pungent, and less bitter. The bark of the
nux vomica tree has very much the twisted
appearance of pieces of dried horn.

Powdered nux vomica, which is one of the
forms in which the drug is preserved, has an
extremely bitter taste, and smells like liquorice.
As a medicine it acts, in very small
doses, as a tonic, and in rather larger
quantities it is given as a stimulant to the
nervous system.

Its very peculiar and extraordinarily
energetic effects, when taken in a poisonous
quantity, have excited the interest of
physiologists, and hecatombs of cats, and dogs, and
mice, and guinea-pigs have been sacrificed in
their researches. In eighteen hundred and
nine, Majendie and Delille read a paper
before the French Institution on the result of
their experiments on animals. Ten grains
taken internally killed a dog in forty-five
minutes, and a grain and a-half thrust into
a wound, killed another in seven minutes.
The symptoms were, in every case, of the
usual character. The animal, a few minutes
after the introduction of the poison, becomes
agitated, and tumbles; in a short time it
is seized with stiffness and starting of the
limbs, which increase until a violent general
spasm ensues, in which the head is bent
back, the limbs are extended and rigid, the
spine stiffened, and respiration checked by
the fixing of the chest. An interval of ease
follows, and then another paroxysm comes
on, and another and another, till the animal
perishes, suffocated or exhausted. Tetanus
or locked jaw is the only disease that
produces similar effects, but never proves so
rapidly fatal.

The action of the poison appears to be
almost entirely confined to the spinal cord
and the nerves of which it is the centre.
Stannius found that the removal of the brain
in frogs, did not interfere with the effects
of the poison; and Eumert's experiments
lead to the same conclusion; he found that
if the spinal cord be destroyed after the
symptoms have come on, the convulsions
cease instantaneously, although the
circulation continues for some minutes. In man,
however, there is occasionally stupor, while
in other instances the sensibility is heightened,
and the faculties are unnaturally acute.

A difference of opinion has existed as to
the post-mortem effects of the poison. This
is most satisfactorily explained by M. Brown-
Seguard in the course of his recent most
interesting experiments. He has noticed that
if a dog be killed after one convulsion, when
there has been no prolonged muscular
exertion, eight days will elapse before putrefaction
is established; if, on the other hand,
the animal endure thirty or forty convulsions,
there is a quick approach, and short
duration of the rigidity of death, and
putrefaction commences in eight hours— exactly a
similar state of things has been noticed in
beasts that have been overdriven, and in
cocks that have died from fighting.

Plants, as well as animals, are affected by
this poison. Professor Marut states, that a
quarter of an hour after immersing the root
of a French bean in a solution of five grains
of the extract of nux vomica in an ounce of
water, the petals became curved downwards
and in twelve hours the plant died. Fifteen
grains of the same extract were inserted in
the stem of a lilac-tree, and the wound closed;
in thirteen days the neighbouring leaves
began to wither.

After all the attention that has been
bestowed upon nux vomica, the skill of man
has been unable to detect any certain
antidote. Its effects during life are too
characteristic ever to be mistaken; and after death,
unlike most vegetable poisons, it is almost
invariably to be found in the stomach of
those poisoned with it. But to the wretched
sufferer science brings no relief. The medical,
man has little else to trust to than emetics
and the stomach-pump; artificial respiration
ought also to be resorted to, and infusion of
galls and green tea, on account of the tannin
they contain, are mentioned as worthy of
trial.

In eighteen hundred and eighteen,
Pelletier and Caventou extracted from nux
vomica the peculiar ingredient strychnine;
it is to this that the seed owes its poisonous
properties: it belongs to a class of substances
which, owing to their action on vegetable
colours, and their forming salts with acids,
have been named vegetable alkalis or
alkaloids, and of which the most familiar are
morphia, obtained from opium, and quinine
from Cinchona bark.

Strychnine is likewise a constituent of St.
Ignatius' beans, the seeds of a tree
indigenous to the Philippine Islands; of one of
the snake-woods of Asia, so called from the
natives imagining that they possess the
power of preserving them from the bites of
serpents; and of the Upas Tiente or Tieltek,
a large climbing shrub in Java. Dr. Darwin,
in a publication entitled the Botanic Garden,
gives an account of the execution of
criminals in Java by darts poisoned with the
Tienté. A few minutes, he states, after the
criminals are wounded, they tremble
violently, utter fearful cries, and perish amid
horrible convulsions in ten or fifteen minutes.
This shrub is not to be confounded with the
celebrated upas-tree, one of the largest fruit-
trees of Java, with the fabulous accounts of
which a traveller named Foersch amused
our grandfathers.

Strychnine, which in our own country is-
exclusively prepared from nux vomica, is a
white crystalline substance, but in the
chemists' shops it is usually to be seen in the