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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
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.
[1] "Farm and Home" Year Book for 1902.
ANCIENT THAMES MILLS
Almost the greatest loss to country scenery is the decay of the ancient windmills and water-mills. The
first has robbed the hilltops of a most picturesque feature, while in the valleys and little glens the roaring,
creaking, dripping wheel sounds no longer, except in favoured spots where it still pays to grind the corn
in the old way. The old town and city mills often survived longer than the country ones, and those on the
Thames longer than those on smaller rivers. The corn and barley which was taken to market in the town
was easily transferred to the town mill, and thence by water to the place of consumption. Every
Wykehamist remembers the ancient and picturesque mills of Winchester, with the mill-stream bridged by
the main street. At Oxford some of the most ancient mills remain to this day, while others have only
recently been destroyed, or have undergone a curious conversion into dwelling-houses, beneath which
the mill-stream still rushes. One of these houses stands near Folly Bridge; another old mill has just
undergone the same process, that close to Holywell Church. Some of these mills are the most ancient
surviving institutions in Oxford, far older than the colleges - older even than any of the churches except
perhaps one. Some of these - the Castle Mill, for instance - have ground corn for centuries since the
abbeys, for whose use they were founded, utterly disappeared. Others were standing long before abbeys
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