It is now the Chemist’s business to determine its properties, to be able to prove its individuality. I have applied the principles which I have just expounded to the detection of morphine, iodine, strychnine, brucine, veratrine, emetine, colchicine, aconitine, atropine, hyoscyamine—and I have succeeded in isolating, without the least difficulty, these different alkalies, previously mixed with foreign matters.
I have thus been able to extract, by this process, morphine from opium, strychnine and brucine from nux vomica, veratrine from extract of veratram, emetine from extract of ipecacuanha, colchicine from tincture of colchicum, aconitine from an aqueous extract of aconite, hyoscyamine from a very old extract of henbane, and atropine from an equally old tincture of {350} belladonna. Thus it is in all confidence that I submit this process to the consideration of Chemists who undertake medico-legal researches.—Bulletin de l’ Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique, tom. vi., No. 2; and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science.
VARIA—EDITORIAL.
OINTMENT OF STAVESACRE IN ITCH.
POISONOUS HONEY.
On eating it there was an unpleasant sense of pricking and burning in the throat, nausea, and a burning sensation throughout the whole system, together with an immediate effect upon vision, approaching to blindness. Several of those who {351} ate of the honey vomited violently and were in great distress. One was rendered entirely blind and insensible, and it was feared for some time might not recover. In the other cases the effect passed off in some ten or twelve hours. In one case a single drop of the honey, taken on the end of the finger from the box where it had leaked through a crevice, had such an effect on the sight that the person could not see to read a newspaper, but it passed off within an hour.
“We are not aware,” continues our informant, “of any poisonous plants in the vicinity where the honey was made, except what is called kill-calf, (Andromeda Mariana) which is found in abundance on Hempstead Plains, at a distance of about a mile.”