Nor is this in the least extraordinary, for when a scanty rainfall produces those great limitless rolling seas of grass, Nature provides first large herbivorous animals to eat it down as well as carnivorous beasts to keep their numbers in control, until such time as a race of horsemen appears, whose domestic cattle replace the bisons, guanacos, kangaroos, and antelopes, and so assist in replenishing and subduing the earth.
CHAPTER XVIII
POISONS
Poisoned arrows—Fish poisons—Manchineel—Curare—A wonderful story—Antiaris—Ordeals—The Obi poison—Oracles produced by poisons—Plants which make horses crazy and others that remove their hair—Australian sheep and the Caustic Creeper—Swelled head—Madness by the Darling Pea—Wild and tame animals, how they know poisons—How do they tell one another?—The Yew tree, when is it, and when is it not poisonous?
EVEN to-day all embryo chemists and doctors are required to "pass" in the recognition of the more important medicinal plants.
But their knowledge is probably very superficial as compared with that of a bushman in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa. Every man, woman, and child in such a tribe knows thoroughly every plant that grows in the neighbourhood. His diet is a varied one, for it includes maggots, fish, frogs, snakes, white ants, and other horrible ingredients, but he lives mainly on roots, bulbs, and herbs of sorts. In times of famine he has had to obtain the most intimate knowledge possible of many plants, that namely which is obtained by eating them, and he has most carefully observed the poisonous kinds. These latter have given him, too, a very powerful weapon, for it is the poisoned arrows which give him the chance of killing game, otherwise utterly beyond his reach. He is on the fair road to becoming a hunter and tribesman, instead of being only a member of a morose, outcast family, always wandering and always hungry.
Probably poisons were first used in fishing. Many vegetable drugs, when thrown into pools and lakes, have the property of stupefying or killing the fish. A great many of these fish poisons are known, and it is quite easy to use them.
Amongst the Dyaks of Borneo, screens of basketwork are placed along a stream to prevent the fish escaping. Then the Dyaks collect along either bank in their canoes. Everybody has a supply of the root of the tubai (Menispermum sp.), which they hammer with stones in the water inside the canoe, so as to extract the poison. At a given signal the poisonous stuff is baled into the river, and very soon afterwards a scene of wild excitement begins, for the fish are speared or captured with handnets as they rise, stupefied, to the surface. The women scoop up the small fry in their nets.[106]
Even at the Sea of Galilee, Tristram mentions that Arabs sometimes obtain their fish by poisoned bread-crumbs. In the South Sea Islands, at Tahiti, a poison is obtained from the nuts of a kind of Betonica, and is used to catch the fish among the reefs near shore.[107] In West Africa several fish poisons are in use (e.g. seeds of Tephrosia Vogelii), and probably the same methods are used almost everywhere. They are by no means extinct even at home, for the occasional poacher sometimes uses fish poisons.
Arrow poison is, however, much more important, and is used by a great number of tribes in almost every part of the world. In 1859, in a war with the Dyaks of Borneo, the English army lost thirty men by poisoned arrows. They are deadly weapons, for the dart is a very thin piece of reed or cane, which has been dipped in the Upas poison (Antiaris toxicaria). It is propelled from a blow pipe, which in practised hands is able to carry 250 feet. One or two of these darts may cause death in two hours' time. The Spaniards, in their conquest of the West Indian islands, were often defeated by the poisoned arrows of the Caribs. The wounded died in agonies of suffering and delirium, sometimes protracted for twenty-four hours after receiving the wound.