CURIOSITIES OF POISON.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2131, 29 November 1890, Page 3

CURIOSITIES OF POISON.

A very intelligent and truatworty resident on the borders of a North American Indian settlement tells a very singular story. He had a young Indian girl in bio kitchen for some years. When she first entered his service so many of her relatives and friends came to see her that he had to give her preemptory orders to admit nobody. Unfortunately, one of her first visitors after this decree had gone forth was an old medicine man of her tribe, whom she steadfastly refused to admit to her kitchen, and who, consequently, went away furiously angry, and vowing all sorts of vengeance. Some months afterwards the eld doctor met the girl. He had apparently quite forgotten the insult he received, and shook hands very heartily with her. She happened to have a slight wound in her hand, and after the old man had grasped it, she saw, to her dismay, that this wound was covered by a black patch, and she told him so. The old man frankly admitted that her suspicions were correct, She had insulted him when they last met, and now he had paid her for it. Eor one month in every year, as long as she lived, he told her that her skin would break out in black blotches. Twelve months afterwards the affliction predicted actually befell the girl, and every year, as long as she remained in the service of the narrator of this story, her skin became blotched and batched all over with black marks, which continued to disfigure her for a month and then disappeared. A Government officer at Winnipeg mentions in one of his official reports a very remarkable poison, which had the effect of paralysing the muscles of the face. Speaking of a woman to whom it had been administered without her own knowledge or consent, this official says: ‘ Only the eyes moved, and as they were intensely black and rather sparking, the ghastly deformity was rendered more glaring. The moat singular effect, however, was produced by her laugh. She was a jolly, good-natured squaw, and laughed upon the slightest provocation. Her eyes sparkled, and her ha ! ha! was musical to a degree ; but not a muscle moved to denote tbe merriment on that expressionless face. One felt that someone else laughed behind that rigid integument. No idea could be formed of what she thought at any time,’ One very interesting result of modern study of poisons is the discovery of some ground for believing that certain diseases, both of body and mind, may be attributable to poison in the system. Ur B, W. Eichardson, for instance, says that somnambulism, he has not the slightest doubt, is produced by the formation in the body ef a peculiar substance which may be derived from starchy parts of the body, and has the effect of the chemically known substance as anylene. He believes that because you produce artificial somnambulism by the use of that substance. Under its influence persons can be made to walk about unconsciously in the same way as the somnambulist does.

The same respected authority affirms there are substances known capable of producing extreme melancholy. There is a peculiar offensive sulphur compound called mercaptan. A little of that administered to any one produces the intensest melancholy, tending almost to suicide. We can sometimes detect a similar offensive substance in the breath of patients who are suffering Irom melancholia, Similarly, there is a well-known poison which produces all the effects of scarlet ferer. There is another, a large dose of which brings about all the symptoms of cholera; and there appear to be several poisons which produce idiotcy or actual madness.