Chapter IV: Preface (4)

We are so accustomed nowadays to danger to life and health from minute, invisible germs, and to exerting all our skill in order to destroy them, that the knowledge of the existence of large and beautiful trees in our midst which can, and do, cause terrible disease and suffering by their mere presence, comes as a shock, and produces a peculiar sense of insecurity greater even than that excited by unseen micro-organisms. For the trees of which I am about to speak are cultivated in our gardens, trained up against the walls of our houses with loving care, and admired for the beautiful autumn tints of their leaves. Yet it is now certain that they are the cause in many persons of most terrible suffering and illness. I am glad to be able to warn my readers in regard to these plants, and I shall be very much interested to hear whether the information which I am about to give proves to be of value in any particular case.

A married couple, friends of my own, went to live, about fourteen years ago, in a newly built, detached house, standing in its own garden, in the neighbourhood of an English city. After they had been there two years the lady developed a very painful eruption or eczema on the face, which, in the course of a few weeks, caused the eyes, nose, and lips to swell to an extraordinary degree, accompanied by the formation of blisters and breaking of the skin. The affection spread to the body, and caused constant pain and corresponding prostration. Her medical attendants were unable either to cure or to account for her condition. After some months she left home, and entirely recovered. But every year the same distressing and disfiguring illness attacked her (commencing in the month of June), and disappeared as soon as she left her house, only to return when she came back to it. The doctors spoke of her affliction as a mysterious form of erysipelas, and even suggested blood-poisoning as the cause. For long periods she was so ill and in so much pain that she was unable to see her friends, and her life was at times in danger.

Two years ago a weekly newspaper published an account, written by a correspondent, of an illness from which he had suffered—exactly agreeing with that which had for so many years tortured my friend’s wife. This writer stated that he had ascertained that the disease was due to the action of a poison given off by a creeper which grew on the walls of his house. He had supposed this plant to be a Virginian creeper; but he had discovered that it was in reality the Californian poison-vine called by botanists _Rhus toxicodendron_. The terribly poisonous nature of this plant is well-known to the people of the United States. It is one of the sumach trees, of which other poisonous kinds are known, whilst more than one species is used (especially in Japan) for preparing a resinous varnish which is used in the manufacture of “lacquered” articles. The writer in the weekly paper stated that he had cut down and burnt the poison-vine which grew on the walls of his house, and that his sufferings had ceased. My friend happened to read this account, and immediately examined his own house. He found a creeper resembling a Virginian creeper, but having three leaflets or divisions of the leaf instead of five, growing around his drawing-room window, and actually spreading its branches and leaves over the window of his wife’s bedroom. He sent specimens of the creeper to Kew, where it was at once identified as the _Rhus toxicodendron_ or American poison-vine or poison-ivy. He caused the plant to be removed and burnt, and, except for a slight attack in July, due no doubt to fragments of the leaves still carried about in the form of dust, his wife has recovered her health.

I have looked into this matter with care, and I find that (presumably in ignorance) nurserymen in England have sold specimens of the poison-vine for planting as creepers, under the name _Ampelopsis Hoggii_. The smaller-leaved Virginian creeper, with self-attaching tendrils, is known as _Ampelopsis Veitchii_, and is, like the larger Virginian creeper (_A. quinquefoliata_), quite harmless. The poison-vine is not an Ampelopsis at all, not even one of the Vitaceæ or vine family, as that genus is. It is a Sumach or Rhus, and belongs to a distinct family, the Terebinthaceæ. It has a three-split leaf, not five leaflets, as has the large Virginian creeper, nor a small three-pointed leaf, as has the _Ampelopsis Veitchii_. The _Veitchii_ frequently has the leaf also split into three leaflets, but the stalk of the middle leaflet is not relatively so long as it is in the poison-vine. The differences and resemblances in the leaves of these plants are shown in the accompanying illustration (Fig. 14), which has been prepared from actual specimens for this book.

The people of the United States are on their guard against this plant, knowing its terrible properties. Sir William Thiselton Dyer, formerly director of Kew Gardens, tells me that specimens of the “American poison-vine” are grown in the garden at Kew, and that he has been present when American visitors (ladies) literally screamed with horror on seeing it, and ran from it as from a mad dog. Several cases are on record of the mysterious poisoning produced by this plant in England; but it is strangely unfamiliar to medical practitioners—indeed, practically unknown to them, although I have ascertained that many English people, especially ladies, have been victims for some years to its unsuspected influence.

At the University of Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they have made quite recently a thorough examination of the poison-vine in the laboratory, with the following results: The poison is an oil—a fixed oil, not a volatile one, as we might have imagined from its mysterious action at a distance. The oil exists in all parts of the plant, even in the fine hairs and cuticle of the leaf. It can be extracted by means of ether, and is one of the most virulent irritants known, having a very curious penetrating and persistent action, and producing violent pain and destruction of tissue when placed on the skin in quantity so minute (one-thousandth of a milligram in two drops of olive oil) as to be beyond the terms of everyday language. It seems to be usually brought to the eyes, nose, lips, and skin of the face and body by the fingers which have touched a leaf or fragments of a leaf in powder. The dead leaf in winter still retains the oil, and minute dust-like particles can carry it. The treatment for it is washing with soap, oil, and ether at an early stage of the attack—especial care being taken to free the fingers from any minute traces of the oil adhering to them.

The poison of the poison-vine only acts upon a limited number of individuals, many people being perfectly immune. At the same time, the effect upon susceptible people appears to be enhanced with every fresh attack; even after the total removal of the poison-vine and its dust from proximity to a susceptible person, he or she is apt for some time—owing to the retention of some trace of the oil in the skin or clothes—to have slight attacks. According to a writer who two years ago gave in the _Spectator_ an account of his own case, the first symptom of an attack is almost invariably a redness and irritation of the eyelids, accompanied by shivering. In a few hours the eyelids are closed, the features unrecognisable, and the skin covered with little blisters. Then the lips swell enormously, the glands of the neck also. In four days the arms and hands are reached, each finger appearing as if terribly scalded and requiring separate bandaging. Then sometimes the lower limbs are involved. After ten days the attack passes off, leaving the patient in a pitiable state of weakness to grow a new skin and recover from other painful results of the poisoning. But no immunity is conferred by an attack; the unhappy victim (who is ignorant of the cause of his sufferings) may, and frequently does, get a new dose of the poison as soon as he has recovered, and the whole course of the illness has again to be passed through. If this account should fall into the hands of any one who is being unwittingly poisoned by the American poison-vine, and may therefore be saved by what I have written from further suffering, I shall be greatly pleased.

There are very few plants which have a power of diffusing poison around them; usually it is necessary to touch or to eat portions of a plant before it can exert any poisonous effect. The eighteenth-century story of the upas-tree of Java, which was fabled to fill a whole valley with its poisonous emanation, and to cause the death of animals and birds at a distance of fifteen miles, is now known to be a romantic invention. The tree in question is merely one having a poisonous juice which was extracted and used by the wilder races of Java as an arrow poison. It is stated that one of the stinging-nettles of tropical India has such virulent poison and such an abundance of it in the hairs on its surface, that explorers have been injured by merely approaching it, the detached hairs probably floating in the air and getting into the eyes, nose, and throat of any one coming near it. The poison of the poisonous stings of both plants and of animals has been to some extent examined of late years. It is a curious fact that there are proportionately few plants which sting as compared with the number and variety of animals which do so. On the other hand, there are an enormous number of plants which are poisonous to man when eaten by him, but there are very few animals which are so.

It will be of interest to my readers to know that I received, in consequence of the publication of the foregoing account of the “Poison-vine” or “Poison-ivy,” more than fifty letters and boxes containing leaves. At Kew Gardens nearly a hundred applications were made with a request for the identification of leaves. The proportion of cases in which leaves of true poison-ivy (_Rhus toxicodendron_) were sent to me seems to be the same as that which they observed at Kew—only two samples of the leaves sent to me were those of the true poison-ivy. Hence we may conclude that the plant has not been very largely introduced in this country, and probably there are not many hundred cases existing in England of the painful malady which it can, in certain people, produce. I have, however, received information of several instances of this poisoning from different parts of the country, which are either now under treatment or have been cured, and in some cases the poison-ivy has been discovered as the cause, owing to the description which I published. It is certainly true that the illness caused by this plant only attacks a small proportion of those who handle it, and it is possible that the plant is more virulent at some seasons and in some soils than in others. In the United States, even in the neighbourhood of New York, it is a real danger, and is recognised as such, but as appears from a letter which I quote below, the reason of the dread which the “poison-ivy” excites in the States depends on the fact that it is not there a mere garden plant, but grows wild in great abundance in the woodlands frequented by holiday-makers and lovers of natural forest and lakeside wilderness. The poisonous nature of the allied species of _Rhus_ used for the manufacture of “lacquer” or varnish is recognised by the Japanese and others who prepare this product and have to handle the plant—they wear gloves to protect the hands.

As showing what kind of trouble the “poison-ivy” and “poison-oak” (another kind of _Rhus_ or _Sumach_) give in the United States, I will quote a letter I have received from an American lady well known in London society. She says: “I have known, suffered, and struggled against the poison-ivy in America from my earliest years, when my poor mother lay for days with blinded and swollen eyes, having gathered it inadvertently. The ‘poison-ivy,’ as we call it, is a curse to country life, outside the purely artificial and cultivated gardens, and even there it creeps in insidiously.” She describes a beautiful farm property on Lake Champlain, on the Canadian border, where she and her family would spend many weeks in summer in order to enjoy the delights of complete seclusion in wild, unspoilt country: “The one and only drawback to the place was,” she writes, “the inexhaustible quantity of poison-ivy. Our first duty had been to teach my two daughters and their governess how to distinguish and avoid contact with it. The one and only rule was that the poison-ivy has the clusters of three leaflets (the middle leaflet with a longer stalk, _E.R.L._), whereas the woodbine (not the English woodbine, which is a convolvulus, _E.R.L._), or, as you call it, ‘Virginian creeper,’ has five leaflets in a cluster. Every path which we used frequently and necessarily, such as the path to the boat-house, and to the cove where the bathing-house stood, we kept cleared of the _Rhus_ for a sufficient width, but in the woods eternal vigilance was the price of safety. To uproot and burn is the only way to destroy it, but, of course, that involves danger to the one who does the work, because contact with the spade used, and with the garments which touched the ivy, might communicate the poison. The farmer and the countryfolk about declared that the fumes from the burning plant could and did poison those who breathed them. We used to turn a flock of sheep into the most used parts. They prefer the poison-ivy to grass, and greedily eat down every leaf within reach in hedge or path. But that, of course, was a mere temporary safety, as the plant is most tenacious of life. I personally had a most grievous experience one summer. I can only suppose that my dress, though very short for wood and hill walking, brushed over the poisonous plant, and then, when I undressed, came into contact with my skin. Both legs became covered with the eruption, eventually developing pustules, and the agony of itching, burning, and smarting was indescribable. The first remedy applied is usually a frequent use of baths of some alkali, generally common soda. With me it was altogether inadequate, and the doctor carefully covered the affected parts with a thick layer of bismuth, and bandaged them, so as to exclude all air. But it took weeks to cure me. A very serious result in many cases is that there is a recurrence of the itching for several years.”

XII

POISONS AND STINGS OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS

To give an account of poisonous plants would require a whole volume. Among plants of every degree and kind are many which produce special chemical substances which are more or less poisonous, and yet often of the greatest value to man when used in appropriate doses, though injurious and even deadly if swallowed in large quantity. Plants are laboratories which build up in a thousand varieties wonderful chemical bodies, some crystalline, some oils, some volatile (as perfumes and aromatic substances), some brilliantly coloured (used as dyes), some pungent, some antiseptic, some of the greatest value as food, and some even digestive, similar to or identical with those formed in the stomach of an animal.

Man, the chemist, every year is learning how to produce in his own laboratories, from coal and wood refuse, many of these bodies, so as to become to an ever-increasing extent independent of the somewhat capricious and costly services of the chemists supplied by nature—the plants. In a recent exhibition there was a case showing on one side the various essential oils used to make up a flask of eau-de-Cologne, and specimens of the plants, flowers, leaves, and fruits from which they are distilled. On the other side of the case was a series of bottles showing the steps in the process by which the modern chemist manufactures from coal-tar and coker-butter the same bodies which give value to the vegetable extracts, and there was finally a bottle of what is called “synthetic eau-de-Cologne”—that is, eau-de-Cologne put together from the products manufactured by the human, instead of the vegetable, chemist.

Whilst man has learnt to avoid swallowing poisonous plants, although occasionally blundering over pretty-looking berries and deceptive mushrooms, he has had little to fear in that way from animals. To a small degree this is due to the fact that only parts of animals are eaten by man, and those very generally are cooked before being eaten, the heating often sufficing to destroy substances present in flesh, fish, and fowl which would be poisonous if taken raw. But, as a matter of fact, animals do not generally protect themselves from being eaten, as plants largely do, by developing nasty or poisonous substances in their flesh, though some do. They fight rather by claws, teeth, and poison glands therewith connected, or else escape by extra quick locomotion, a method not possible to plants. Many insects (butterflies, beetles, and bugs), however, produce nasty aromatic substances which cause animals like birds and lizards to reject them as food. The toad and the salamander both produce a very deadly poison in their damp, soft skins, which causes any animal to drop them from its mouth, and to regret “bitterly” the attempt to swallow them. The frog has no such poison in its skin, but can jump out of harm’s way. The strong yellow and black marking of the European salamander is what is called a “warning” coloration, just as is the yellow and black outfit of the poisonous wasp. Animals learn to leave the yellow and black livery untouched, and the creatures so marked escape the injury which would be caused them by tentative bites.

There is a curious variation as to susceptibility on the part of man to poison in the flesh of fishes and shell-fishes when taken by him as food. The word “idiosyncrasy” is applied to such individual susceptibility, and is, of course, applicable to the susceptibility shown by some persons to the poison of the American poison-vine, described in the last article, and of others to acute inflammation from the dust of hayfields. Some persons cannot eat lobster, crab, or oysters or mussels without being poisoned in a varying degree by certain substances present in those “shell-fish” even when cooked. Often a “rash” is caused on the skin, and colic. Others, again, cannot eat any fish of any kind without being poisoned in a similar way, or possibly are only liable to be poisoned by grey mullet or by mackerel. The most curious cases of this individual variability are found in the rash and fever caused by the vegetable drug quinine in rare instances, and the violent excitement produced in some persons by the usually soporific laudanum. All such cases have very great interest as showing us what a small difference separates an agreeable flavour or a valuable medicine from a rank poison, and how readily the chemical susceptibility of a complex organism like man may vary between toleration and deathly response, without any concomitant indication of such difference being apparent (in our present state of knowledge), in two individuals, to one of whom that is poison which to the other is meat. They also furnish a parallel to that marvellous conversion of “toxin” into “anti-toxin,” in consequence of which the blood of an animal injected with small, increasing doses of deadly snake poison or diphtheria poison becomes an antidote to the same poison taken into the blood of an unprepared animal.

There is, over and above these special cases of fish foods which are tolerated by some and are poison to others, a whole series of fishes which cannot be eaten by any one without serious poisoning being the result, even when the fish are carefully cooked. Happily, these fishes are rarely, if ever, caught on our own coasts. They produce, when even small bits are eaten, violent irritation of the intestine, and death, the symptoms resembling in many respects those of cholera. The curious bright-coloured, beaked fish of tropical seas and coral reefs, with two or four large front teeth and spherical spine-covered bodies, and the trigger fish of the same regions, are the chief of these poisonous fish. But there is a true anchovy on the coast of Japan, and a small herring in the West Indies, and a goby on the Indian coast (Pondicherry), all of which are deadly poison even when cooked; and there are many others. So one has to be careful about fish-eating in the remoter parts of the world. The poisons of these fish with poisonous flesh have not been carefully studied, but they seem to resemble chemically the poisons produced by certain putrefactive microbes.

Let us now revert to the more special subject of poisonous stings. Every one knows that although it is unpleasant to be pricked by the little spines on the leaf of a thistle, it is not the same unpleasantness as being “stung” by a nettle. There is no poison in the thistle. The hairs which beset the leaves of the common nettle are firm, but brittle and hollow; they break off in the skin, and a poison exudes from their interior. Under the microscope—and it is quite easy to examine it with a high power—the hollow nettle hair is seen to be partly occupied by living protoplasm—a transparent, viscid substance which shows an active streaming movement, and has embedded in it a dense kernel or nucleus (see Fig. 15 _bis_). It is, in fact, a living “cell,” or life unit. The space in the cell not occupied by protoplasm is filled with clear liquid, which contains the poison. This has been examined chemically by using a large quantity of nettle hairs, and is found to contain formic acid—the same irritating acid which is secreted by ants when they sting, whence its name. But later observations show that the juice of the nettle hair contains also a special poison in minute quantities, an albuminous substance, which resembles that contained in the poison-sacs at the base of the teeth of snakes.

In tropical regions there are nettles far more powerful than that of our own country. The one called _Urtica stimulans_, which is found in Java, and that called _Laportea crenulata_, found in Hindostan, when bruised emit an effluvium which poisonously affects the eyes and mouth, and if handled produce convulsions and serious swelling and pain in the arms, which may last for three or four weeks, and in some cases cause death. They are not unknown in the hothouses of our botanical gardens, and young gardeners are sometimes badly stung by them. There are other plants provided with poisonous stinging hairs besides the true nettles or _Urticaceæ_, though they are not numerous. The American plants called _Loasa_ sting badly, so do some of the Spurges (_Euphorbiaceæ_), and some _Hydrophylleæ_.

The Chinese primrose (_Primula obconica_), lately introduced into greenhouses, has been found to be almost as injurious as the poison-vine. Its effects, of course, are limited to a much smaller group of sufferers. And it is worth while, in connection with poisoning by primula and the poisoning by _Rhus toxicodendron_ of only certain individuals predisposed to its influence, to point out that the malady known as hay fever seems to be similar in its character to these vegetable poisonings. It is, of course, well known that only certain individuals are liable to the more violent and serious form of hay fever. It is not at all improbable that this irritation of the air passages, often attributed to the mechanical action of the pollen of grass and other plants—really is due to minute quantities of a poison like that of the poison-vine, present in the pollen of some hay plant yet to be suspected, tried, and convicted.[2]

With regard to a poisonous action at a distance being possibly exerted by plants, we must not overlook the effects of some perfumes discharged into the air by flowers. Primarily such perfumes appear to serve the flowers by attracting to them special insects, by whose movements and search for honey in the flowers the pollen of one is conveyed to another and fertilisation effected. Human beings are sometimes injuriously affected by the heavy perfume given out by lilies and other flowers, headache and even fainting being the result. No instance is known of serious injury or death resulting in the regions where they grow from the overpowering perfume of such flowers. But that admirable story-teller, Mr. H. G. Wells, has made a legitimate use of scientific possibilities in imagining the existence of a rare tropical orchid which attracts large animals to it by its wonderful odour. The effects of the perfume are narcotising; the animal, having sniffed at the orchid, drops insensible at the foot of the tree trunk on which the orchid grows. Then the orchid rapidly, with animal-like celerity, sends forth those smooth green fingers or “suckers,” which you may see clinging to the pots and shelves on which an orchid is growing. As they slowly creep, in their growth, over the poisoned animal, they absorb its life’s blood painlessly and without disturbing the death-slumber of the victim. Mr. Wells supposes a retired civil-servant, with feeble health and a passion for orchids, to have purchased an unknown specimen, which, after some months of nursing, is about to blossom in the little hothouse of his suburban home. He goes quietly and alone one afternoon, when his housekeeper is preparing his tea, to enjoy the first sight and smell of the unknown flower, and is found, some three hours later, lying insensible before the orchid, which is giving out an intoxicating odour, and is looking very vigorous and wicked. A blood-red tint pervades its leaves and stalks, and it has already pushed some of its finger-like shoots round the orchid-lover’s neck and beneath his shirt front. When they are pulled away a few drops of blood flow from the skin where the absorbent shoots had applied themselves. The victim recovers.

When we take a survey of the “stings” and poison-fangs and spurs of animals, we find a much greater abundance and variety of these weapons than in plants. They serve animals not only as a means of defence, but very often for the purpose of attacking and paralysing their prey. We have to distinguish broadly between (_a_) gut-poisons and (_b_) wound-poisons. The slimy surface of the skin and the juices of animals are often poisonous if introduced into wounds, but harmless if swallowed, though in the toad and salamander the skin contains a poison which acts on the mouth and stomach. Thus the blood of the eel is poisonous to higher animals if injected beneath the skin, though not poisonous when swallowed. Pasteur found that the saliva of a healthy human baby a few weeks old produced convulsions when injected beneath the skin of a rabbit. The fluid of the mouth in fishes (_Muræna_), in some lizards (_Heloderma_), and some warm-blooded quadrupeds, like the skunk, is often poisonous, and is introduced into the wound inflicted by a bite. The elaboration of a sac of the mouth-surface secreting a special quantity of poison to be injected by aid of a grooved tooth, such as we find in poisonous snakes, is only a mechanical improvement of this more general condition. The same general poisonous quality is found in the slime of the skins of fishes which have spines by means of which poisonous wounds are inflicted (sting-rays). And here, too, an elaboration is effected in some fishes in which a sac is provided for the accumulation of the poison, and a specially grooved spine, to convey the poison into the wound inflicted by it. A common fish on our coasts, the weever (probably the same word as viper), is provided with grooved, stinging spines, but no special poison-sac. Some of the poison-carrying spines support the front portion of the dorsal fin, which is of a deep black colour, a striking instance of the warning coloration which poisonous animals often possess.

The poison introduced into wounds by the spines or fangs of animals is essentially similar to that of nettle hairs; it has the effect of paralysing and of producing convulsions. It is a remarkable fact that formic acid often in insects accompanies the paralysing poison—as it does in the nettle—and produces intense pain and irritation, which the more dangerous nerve-poison does not. Immunity to a given wound-poison may be produced by the injection of doses of it, at first excessively minute, but gradually increased in quantity. A remedial “anti-toxin” is thus prepared from the blood of immunised animals, which is used as a cure or as a protection by injecting it into other animals exposed to bites or wounds conveying the particular poison by the use of which the anti-toxin was produced. Bee-keepers who have often been stung become in many cases immune, and do not suffer from bee-sting. Men who in France pursue a business as viper-catchers, are said to become immune to viper’s poison in the same way. Snakes and scorpions are but little, if at all, affected by their own poison when it is injected into them. This appears to be due to the fact that the poison-producing animal is always absorbing into its blood very minute doses of the poison which it has elaborated and stored up in its poison-sac connected with the poison-gland. This small quantity of poison continually absorbed is continually converted into an anti-toxin—just as happens when a horse is treated with doses of snake-poison to prepare the remedial anti-toxin for use in cases of snake-bite, or with diphtheria-poison in order to prepare the diphtheria anti-toxin now so largely used. The anti-toxin is a substance very closely similar in chemical constitution to the toxin by the conversion of which it is formed in the blood. Its action on the toxin (or essential poisonous substance of the venom) appears to be a very delicate and slight chemical disturbance of the constitution of that chemical body. Yet it is enough to cause the injurious quality of the toxin to be suddenly and completely abrogated, although from the point of view of chemical composition it is only, as it were, shaken or given a twist! Such great practical differences in the action on living creatures of chemical bodies having themselves so subtle a difference of chemical structure as to almost defy our powers of detection, are now well known.

I made some experiments a few years ago on the poison of scorpions, which were published by the Linnæan Society. I obtained live scorpions—a beautiful citron-coloured kind, of large size—from Biskra, in Algeria (Fig. 15). The poison-gland and sac are double, and contained in the last joint of the tail, which is swollen, and ends in a splendid curved spine or sting. The scorpion carries its tail raised in a graceful curve over its back, and strikes with the sting by a powerful forward stroke. One can seize the tail by the last joint but one, and thus safely hold the animal, and see the poison exude in drops from the perforated sting. I found that if I pressed the sting thus held into the scorpion’s own body, or into that of another scorpion, no harm resulted to the wounded animal, although plenty of the poison entered the little wound made by the sting. A large cockroach or a mouse similarly wounded by the sting was paralysed, and died in a few minutes. It is a custom in countries where scorpions abound, and are troublesome, and even dangerous to human life, for the natives to make a circle of red-hot charcoal, and to place a large scorpion in the centre of the enclosed area. The scorpion, it is stated, runs round inside the circle, and, finding that escape is impossible, deliberately drives its sting into its back, and so commits suicide. My experiments showed that the scorpion could not kill itself in this way, as its poison does not act on itself. Moreover, it has been shown by Professor Bourne, of Madras, that although scorpions constantly fight with one another, they never attempt to use their stings in these battles, but only their powerful, lobster-like claws. The stings would be useless, and are reserved for their attacks on animals susceptible to the poison. I also found the ground for the belief that the scorpion kills itself when enclosed in a fiery circle. Incredible as it may appear in regard to such denizens of the hot regions of the earth, both the desert scorpion and the large dark-green Indian scorpions actually faint and become motionless and insensible when exposed for a few minutes to a temperature a little above that of the human body. This was carefully ascertained by using an incubator and a thermometer. The scorpion in the fiery circle lashes about with its sting, and then suddenly faints owing to the heat. If removed from the heat it recovers completely; but, of course, when it is supposed to have committed suicide, no one takes the trouble to remove it. I made, several times, the actual experiment of placing a large active scorpion within a ring-like wall, a foot in diameter, formed by live coals. The scorpion never stung itself. On one occasion it walked out over the coals, and on other occasions, after lashing its tail and running about, fainted, and became motionless.

Jelly-fishes are often called “sea-nettles,” because of the microscopic poison-bearing threads which they discharge from their skin. These are used to paralyse their prey, and, in a few kinds only, are sufficiently powerful to cause a “stinging” effect when they come into contact with a bather’s skin. Sea-anemones are also armed with these minute threads, and their poison has been extracted and studied. The spines of star-fishes and sea-urchins have a very deadly poison associated with them, which has recently been examined. Among insects we have the bees, wasps, and ants, with their terminal stings; caterpillars, with poisonous hairs; gnats, with poisonous mouth glands. Residents in mosquito-infested countries become “immune” to the poison of gnat-bite, but not to the deadly germs of malaria and yellow fever carried by the gnats. The centipedes have powerful jaws, provided with poison-sacs; the spiders have stabbing claws, fitted with poison-glands. Shell-fish, such as crabs and lobsters, do not possess stings or poison-sacs, but some of the whelk-like sea-snails have poison-glands, which secrete a fluid deadly to other shell-fish. We have already spoken of the poison-spines of fishes; among reptiles it is only some of the snakes which are poisonous, and are known to have poison-glands connected with grooved fangs. Only one kind of lizard—the Heloderm of North America, already mentioned—has poison-glands in its mouth, but it has no special poison-fangs, only small teeth. There is a most persistent and curious popular error to the effect that the rapidly moving bifid tongue of snakes and lizards is a “sting.” It is really quite innocuous. No sting is known among birds, although some have fighting “spurs” on the leg, and “claws” on the wing.

Only the lowest of the mammals or warm-blooded hairy quadrupeds—namely, the Australian duck-mole (_Ornithorhynchus_) and the spiny ant-eater (_Echidna_)—have poison-glands and related “spurs,” or stings. They have on the hind-leg a “spur” of great size and strength, which is perforated and connected with a gland which produces a poisonous milky fluid. Recent observations, however, as to the poisonous character of this fluid are wanting. Many mammals have large sac-like glands, which open by definite apertures, in some cases between the toes, in others upon the legs, at the side or back of the head (the elephant), in the middle of the back or about the tail. The fluid secreted by these glands is not poisonous nor acrid, but odoriferous, and seems to serve to attract the individuals of a species to one another. They resemble in structure and often in position the poison-glands of the spurs of the duck-mole and spiny ant-eater.

Many insects produce a good deal of irritation, and even dangerous sores, by biting and burrowing in the human skin, without secreting any active poison. Often they introduce microscopic germs of disease in this way from one animal to another, as, for instance, do gnats, tsetze-flies, and horse-flies, and as do some small kinds of tics. The bites of the flea, of midges, gnats, and bugs are comparatively harmless unless germs of disease are introduced by them, an occurrence which, though exceptional, is yet a great and terrible danger. We now know that it is in this way, and this way only, that malaria or ague, yellow fever, plague, sleeping-sickness, and some other diseases are carried from infected to healthy men. Various diseases of horses and cattle are propagated in the same way. The mere bites of insects may be treated with an application of carbolic acid dissolved in camphor. The pain caused by the acid stings of bees, wasps, ants, and nettles can be alleviated by dabbing the wound with weak ammonia (hartshorn). Insects which bury themselves in the skin, such as the jigger-flea of the West Indies and tropical Africa, should be dug out with a needle or fine blade. The minute creature, like a cheese-mite, which burrows and breeds in the skin of man and causes the affliction known as the itch must be poisoned by sulphurous acid—a result achieved by rubbing the skin freely with sulphur ointment on two or three successive days. A serious pest in the summer in many parts of England is a little animal known as the harvest-man. These are the young of a small red spider-like creature, called _Trombidium_. They get on to the feet of persons walking in the grass, and crawl up the legs and burrow into the tender skin. Benzine will keep them away if applied to the ankles or stockings when they are about, and will also destroy them once they have effected a lodgment.

FOOTNOTES

[2] Since the above was written, I have seen the account by an American physician—in a recently issued volume of Osler’s _Treatise on Medicine_—of his recent discovery of the grass which produces in its pollen the poison of hay fever, and of the preparation by him of an anti-toxin which appears to give relief to those who suffer from hay fever.

XIII

THE DRAGON: A FANCY OR A FACT

I am about to write of loathly dragons, “gorgons and hydras and chimæras dire.” Every one knows what a dragon looks like, though probably most people could not give a minute description of the beast. A number of quite distinct creatures, some living on land, some in sea, are spoken of in the Bible by a word which is translated as “dragon.” The ancient Welsh chieftains, like many fighting princes of old days, bore a “dragon” on their banners, and were themselves called “dragons” (Pen-dragon), and when a knight slew such a chieftain fabulous stories grew up as to his combat with and slaughter of a “dragon.”

The complete, legitimate dragon of the present day is the dragon of heraldry, which is maintained in proper form and with authorised attributes by the Heralds’ College. I have a drawing of this “official” beast before me (Fig. 16). He is represented as of large size, but whether theoretically the heralds of to-day consider him to be as large as a lion or ten times as long and tall I do not know. His body is lizard-like, and covered with scales resembling those of some lizards (unlike a crocodile in this respect). His head is not unlike that of a crocodile, excepting that he has a short, sharp horn on his nose, and a beard on his chin, and also a pair of large pointed ears which no living reptile possesses. His mouth is open, showing teeth like those of a crocodile, and from it issues a remarkable tongue, terminating in an arrow-head-shaped weapon (presumably a “sting”) unlike anything known in any living animal. His tail is very long and snake-like (an important fact when we come to consider his ancestry), and is thrown into coils. It terminates in an arrow-head-shaped structure like that of the tongue, quite unlike anything known in any real animal. He has four powerful limbs, which are not like those of a lizard or a crocodile. They resemble those of an eagle, and have grasping toes and claws, three directed forward and one backward. In addition, he has a pair of wings, which are leathery, and supported by several parallel bars, a structure which gives the wings a remote resemblance to those of a bat. The wing is quite unlike that of a pterodactyle (the great extinct flying lizard), and has no resemblance whatever to that of a bird, which is, of course, formed by separate quill feathers set in a row on the bones of the fore-arm and hand. The wings are always represented (even in illegitimate and Oriental dragons) as much too small to carry the dragon in flight. The dragon has, further, a crest of separate triangular plates set in a row along the mid-line of his back, extending from his head to the end of his tail. Some lizards (but not crocodiles) have such a crest. The most like it is that of the New Zealand lizard, called the _Sphenodon_.

Such is the creature called “the” dragon. But heraldry recognises some other terrible beasts allied to the dragon; in fact, what zoologists would call “allied species.” The griffin, for instance (Fig. 17), is a four-legged beast like the dragon, but has the beak and wings and forefeet of an eagle, and the hind-legs and tail of a lion. The heraldic hydra is a dragon, such as I have above described, but with seven heads and necks. The ancient Greek representation of the hydra destroyed by Hercules (as painted on vases) was, on the contrary, based upon the octopus, or eight-armed cuttle-fish, each arm carrying a snake-like head (Fig. 18). The wyvern is an important variety of the dragon tribe, well known to heralds, but not to be seen every day. It so far conforms to natural laws that it has only two legs, the fore-limbs being the wings (Fig. 19). The true dragon and the griffin, like the angel of ecclesiastical art, have actually six limbs—namely, a pair of fore-legs or arms, a pair of hind-legs, and, in addition, a pair of wings. Occasionally an artist (even in ancient Egyptian works of art) has attempted to avoid this redundance of limbs by representing an angel as having the arms themselves provided with an expanse of quill feathers. This is certainly a less extraordinary arrangement than the outgrowth of wings (which in birds, bats, and pterodactyles actually are the modified arms or fore-limbs), as an extra pair of limbs rooted in the back. The wyvern and the cockatrice and the basilisk (Fig. 20) (which, like the Gorgon Medusa, can strike a man dead by the mere glance of the eye) are remarkable for conforming to the invariable vertebrate standard of no more than two pairs of limbs, whether legs, wings, or fins. The name “lind-worm” is given to a wyvern without wings (hence the Linton Worm and the Laidley Worm of Lambton), and appears in various heraldic devices and in legendary art; whilst in the arms of the Visconti of Milan we climb down to a quite simple serpent-like creature without legs or wings, known as the “guivre.”

Without looking further into the strange and fantastic catalogue of imaginary monsters, one must recognise that it is a matter of great interest to trace the origin of these marvellous creations of human fancy, and the way in which they have first of all been brought into pictorial existence, and then variously modified and finally stereotyped and maintained by tradition and art. It has not infrequently been suggested, since geologists made us acquainted with the bones of huge and strange-looking fossil reptiles dug from ancient rocks, that the tradition of “the dragon” is really a survival of the actual knowledge and experience of these extinct monsters on the part of “long-ago races of men.” It is a curious fact, mentioned by a well-known writer, Mrs. Jameson, that the bones of a great fossil reptile were preserved and exhibited at Aix in France as the bones of the dragon slain by St. Michael, just as the bones of a whale are shown as those of the mythical Dun-cow of Warwick in that city.

There are three very good reasons for not entertaining the suggestion that the tradition of the dragon and similar beasts is due to human co-existence with the great reptiles of the past. The first is that the age of the rocks known as cretaceous and jurassic (or oölitic), in which are found the more or less complete skeletons of the great saurians—many bigger in the body than elephants, and with huge tails in addition, iguanodon, megalosaurus, diplodocus, as well as the winged pterodactyles (see Plate II., where a representation is given of what we know as to the form and bearing of two species of pterodactyle) and a vast series of such creatures—is so enormously remote that not only man but all the hairy warm-blooded animals like him, did not come into existence until many millions of years after these rocks had been deposited by water and the great reptiles buried in them had become extinct. The cave-men of the Pleistocene period are modern, even close to us, as compared with the age when the great saurians flourished. That was just before the time when our chalk-cliffs were being formed as a slowly growing sediment on the floor of a deep sea. No accurate measure of the time which has elapsed since then is possible, but we find that about 200 ft. thickness of deposit has been accumulated since the date of the earliest human remains known to us—whilst over 5000 ft. have accumulated since the chalk began to be deposited, and the great saurians ceased to exist. If we reckon, in accordance with the most moderate estimate, a quarter of a million years for the upper 200 ft. of deposit or human period (Pleistocene), we must suppose that twenty or thirty times as long a period has elapsed to allow time for the deposit of the 5000 ft. of sand and rock since the great saurians ceased to exist. This would be some six or seven million years—a long while for tradition to run, even supposing man existed all that time, which he did not. And the probability is that this estimate of the time is far too small: a hundred million years is nearer the truth.

REAL DRAGONS

THE EXTINCT FLYING REPTILES KNOWN AS PTERODACTYLES. THEIR BONES AND WING MEMBRANES ARE PRESERVED IN THE OOLITIC ROCKS. SOME MEASURED EIGHTEEN FEET ACROSS THE EXPANDED WINGS.

_From “Extinct Animals,” by Sir Ray Lankester. (Constable & Co.)_]

Suppose that man came into existence as an intelligent creature, capable of handing on a tradition, as much as half a million or even a million years before the date of the remains of the earliest cave-men discovered in Europe, we yet get no long way down the avenue of past time. Man would still be separated by millions of years and long ages of change and development of the forms of animal life on the earth’s surface, from the period of the great reptiles or saurians who flourished before the chalk was deposited. And there is good evidence that none of those great saurians survived the date of the chalk. They died out and their place was taken by the earliest ancestors of elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, cattle, lions, and monkeys, from which in the course of ages the animals we know by those names were developed, whilst very late in the history man was produced. The reptiles continued as small, furtive creatures—the lizards and a few biggish snakes and crocodiles—but no descendants of “the great Dinosaurs” survived.

Another reason against the supposed survival of a real tradition of dragons is that, even in regard to much later—immensely later—creatures, such as the mammoth or hairy elephant, which we know was contemporary with man, there is no real tradition. The natives of the sub-arctic regions in which the skeletons and whole carcases of the mammoth are found in a frozen state, and from whence many hundreds of tusks of the mammoth have been since the earliest times yearly exported and used in Europe as ivory, have no “tradition” of these creatures. They have fanciful stories about the ghosts of the mammoths, but they call their tusks “horns,” and have no legends of the monster as a living thing. The use of mammoth’s ivory in Northern Europe dates back for a thousand years historically, and probably has never ceased since the days of the cave-men. Three years ago I examined the richly carved drinking horn of a Scandinavian hero, dating from the tenth century, and preserved amongst the treasures of York Minster, and I have little doubt that it is fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth.

A third reason for rejecting any connection of the dragon with a real reminiscence of the great extinct saurians is that its origin and its gradual building up in human fancy can be traced in the same way as that of many other fanciful and legendary creatures by reference to the regular operation of the imagination in successive ages of mankind. All races of men have imagined monsters by combining into one several parts of different animals. The centaur of the Greeks is a blend of man and horse, the great “divine” chimera of the Greeks was a two-headed blend of lion and goat, and any such mixed creature is technically called nowadays “a chimera”. The dragon is classed by heralds as a chimera. Sometimes one of these imaginary beasts has its origin in a terrible or weird animal, which really exists in some distant land, and is celebrated or even worshipped by the inhabitants of that distant land, whose descriptions of it are carried in a distorted and exaggerated form to regions where it does not exist.

The dragon appears to be nothing more nor less in its origin than one of the great snakes (pythons), often 25 ft. in length, which inhabit tropical India and Africa. Its dangerous character and terrible appearance and movement impressed primitive mankind, and traditions of it have passed with migrating races both to the East and to the West, so that we find the mythical dragon in ancient China and in Japan, no less than in Egypt and in Greece. It retains its snake-like body and tail, especially in the Chinese and Japanese representations (Figs. 21 and 22); but in both East and West, legs and wings have been gradually added to it for the purpose of making it more terrible and expressing some of its direful qualities. Chinese traditions indicate the mountains of Central Asia as the home of the dragon, whilst the ancient Greeks considered it to have come from the East. As a matter of fact, the Greek word “drakon” actually meant plainly and simply a large snake, and is so used by Aristotle and other writers. There is a beautiful Greek vase-painting (Fig. 23) showing the dragon which guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides as nothing more than a gigantic snake (without legs or wings), coiled round the trunk of the tree on which the apples are growing (like the later pictures of the serpent on the apple tree in the Garden of Eden), whilst the ladylike Hesperides are politely welcoming the robust Hercules to their garden.

The worship and propitiation of the serpent is an immensely old form of religion (antecedent to Judaism), and exists, or has existed, in both the old world and the new. The Egyptians revered a great serpent-god called “Ha-her,” or “great Lord of fear and terror”; to him the wicked were handed over after death to be bitten and tortured. The evil spirit in the Scandinavian mythology was a huge snake—and the connection, not to say confusion, of the terrible snake with the dragon on the part of the early Christians is shown by the words in Revelation xx. 1, 2, “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan.” The mediæval devil with goat’s feet retained the dragon’s tail with its curious triangular termination.