The cases of immunity from the action of certain vegetable poisons, in connexion with colour, are more interesting, and are at present wholly inexplicable. I have already given a remarkable instance, on the authority of Professor Wyman, of all the hogs, excepting those of a black colour, suffering severely in Virginia from eating the root of the Lachnanthes tinctoria. According to Spinola and others,[[41]] buckwheat (Po1ygonum fagopyrum), when in flower, is highly injurious to white or white-spotted pigs, if they are exposed to the heat of the sun, but is quite innocuous to black pigs. According to two accounts, the Hypericum crispum in Sicily is poisonous to white sheep alone; their heads swell, their wool falls off, and they often die; but this plant, according to Lecce, is poisonous only when it grows in swamps; nor is this improbable, as we know how readily the poisonous principle in plants is influenced by the conditions under which they grow.
Three accounts have been published in Eastern Prussia, of white and white-spotted horses being greatly injured by eating mildewed and honeydewed vetches; every spot of skin bearing white hairs becoming inflamed and gangrenous. The Rev. J. Rodwell informs me that his father turned out about fifteen cart-horses into a field of tares which in parts swarmed with black aphides, and which no doubt were honeydewed, and probably mildewed; the horses, with two exceptions, were chestnuts and bays with white marks on their faces and pasterns, and the white parts alone swelled and became angry scabs. The two bay horses with no white marks entirely escaped all injury. In Guernsey, when horses eat fool’s parsley (Æthusa cynapium) they are sometimes violently purged; and this plant “has a peculiar effect on the nose and lips, causing deep cracks and ulcers, particularly on horses with white muzzles.”[[42]] With cattle, independently of the action of any poison, cases have been published by Youatt and Erdt of cutaneous diseases with much constitutional disturbance (in one instance after exposure to a hot sun) affecting every single point which bore a white hair, but completely passing over other parts of the body. Similar cases have been observed with horses.[[43]]
We thus see that not only do those parts of the skin which bear white hair differ in a remarkable manner from those bearing hair of any other colour, but that some great constitutional difference must be correlated with the colour of the hair; for in the above-mentioned cases, vegetable poisons caused fever, swelling of the head, as well as other symptoms, and even death, to all the white, or white-spotted animals.
REFERENCES
[1] ‘Hist. des Anomalies,’ tom. iii. p. 392. Prof. Huxley applies the same principle in accounting for the remarkable, though normal, differences in the arrangement of the nervous system in the Mollusca, in his paper on the Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca in ‘Phil. Transact.,’ 1853, p. 56.
[2] ‘Eléments de Tératologie Veg.,’ 1841, p. 13.
[3] Prof. J. B. Simonds on the Age of the Ox, Sheep, etc., quoted in ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ 1854, p. 588.
[4] ‘Hist. des Anomalies,’ tom. i. p. 674.
[5] Quoted by Isid. Geoffroy, ibid., tom. i. p. 635.
[6] ‘The Poultry Book,’ by W. B. Tegetmeier, 1866, p. 250.