Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/717

 *teria medica, as possessing very extraordinary medicinal qualities; and since its use is gaining ground, every medical jurist ought to be conversant with its properties as a poison. I have also met with an instance where it was administered for the purpose of procuring miscarriage.

Of Poisoning with Spurred Rye.

Spurred Rye, or Secale cornutum, the Seigle ergoté, or Ergot of the French, and Mutterkorn, or Roggenmutter, of the Germans, is a disease common to various grains, in consequence of which the place of the pickle is supplied by a long, black substance, like a little horn or spur. It has been known to attack many plants of the order Graminaceæ; and among those used as food by man, it has been observed on barley, oats, spring-wheat, winter-wheat, and rye. But the rye seems peculiarly subject to it, almost all the poison which has caused epidemics, as well as what is now used in medicine, being produced by that grain.

Of the Cause and Nature of the Spur in Rye.—The spur attacks rye chiefly in damp seasons, and in moist clay soils, particularly those recently redeemed from waste lands in the neighbourhood of forests. Of all the places where the spur has been hitherto observed none combines these conditions so perfectly, and none has been so much infested with the disease, as the district of Sologne, situated between the rivers Loire and Cher, in France. According to the statistical researches of the Abbé Tessier, who in 1777 was deputed by the Parisian Society of Medicine to investigate the causes of the extraordinary prevalence of the ergot in that district, the country was then so much intersected by belts of wood around the fields, that the traveller in passing along might imagine he was constantly approaching an immense forest; the arable land was so poor, that, although it lay fallow every third season, it was exhausted in nine or twelve years at farthest, and then remained a long time in pasture before it could again bear white crops; the surface was so level, and consequently so wet, that crops were obtained only when the seed was sown on the tops of furrows a foot high; and the climate is so moist, that from the month of September till late in spring the whole country is overhung by dense fogs. Here the rye, the common food of the peasantry, appears to have been in Tessier's time more liable to be attacked by the spur than in any other part of the continent. Tessier found, that after being thrashed it contained on an average about a forty-eighth part of ergot, even in good seasons; but in bad seasons, and taking into account a considerable propor-*