Of these the deadly nightshade and hemlock are the best known in story, while the yew is most dangerous because far more common. In one case the Rector of a Berkshire village was made very ill by eating honey which had been partly gathered from yew flowers. Green hellebore and monkshood are also classed in the list of the ranker poisons. Deadly nightshade is rather a rare plant, yet it may be seen often enough on the sides of woods where there are old walls. It is poisonous throughout. The flowers are large, single, purple bells, and the berries black and shiny like a black cherry. It is said of this dangerous plant that the roots are computed to be five times more poisonous than the berries, that human beings have been found more susceptible to it than animals, and carnivorous animals more so than others. Children suffer more in proportion to the quantity of poison taken than do adults. But cases of nightshade poisoning are very rare, though two were reported some three years ago. Possibly the berries often fail to ripen, and so are less attractive in appearance. The poisonous hemlocks are two, one of which, the common hemlock, is said to have been the plant from which the Athenians prepared their poison for executing citizens condemned to death; and the other, the water-hemlock, or cowbane, is particularly deadly when eaten by cattle, to which it is fatal in a very few hours. Another plant, used for preparing poison in India, which produces a drug used by some tribes of Thugs for procuring the death of their victims, datura or stramonium, has now found a place amongst our wild flowers. It has an English name, thorn-apple, and is said to have been naturalised by the gipsies, who used the seeds as a medicine and narcotic, and carried them about with them in their wanderings. Like henbane, it is often seen on rubbish-heaps and in old brickfields. The leaf is very handsome, and the flower white and trumpet-shaped. Both this plant and the henbane retain their poisonous properties even when dried in hay, and stalled cows have been known to be poisoned by fodder containing a mixture of the latter plant.
Cattle have a delicate sense of smell which warns them of the danger of most poisonous English herbs, though apparently this warning odour is absent from the plants which kill so many horses when the grass grows on the South African veld, and also from our English yew. Yew was anciently employed as a poison in Europe, much as is the curari to-day in Central America. Dr. W.T. Fernie, the author of "Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Use," says that its juice is a rapidly fatal poison, that it was used for poisoning arrows, and that the symptoms correspond in a very remarkable way with those which follow the bites of venomous snakes. It is believed that in India there is a poison which produces the same effect. An Indian Rajah once desired that a notice should be put in a well-known paper that he did not intend to raise his rents on his accession to the estates. The proprietor of the paper asked him his reasons for wishing for such an advertisement. The Rajah said that his grandfather had raised the rents, and had died of snake-bite; that his father had done the same, and had also died of snake-bite; and that he concluded that there was some connection of cause and effect. The notice was inserted, and this Rajah did not die of snake-bite, or rather of the poison which simulates it.