at the end with a tincture of the guaco, the serpent invariably turned away its head; but while he pointed a stick without the guaco, it did not move. The negroes and Indians, before they handle a snake, inoculate themselves in four or five places with the guaco; and also take some spoonsful internally of a tincture of it, and, when bitten, immediately apply the chewed or dried leaf to the bite.

There are various kinds of fish in the West Indies which are occasionally poisonous; and it is commonly considered that they become so from the substances they may happen to feed upon; an opinion which is probably erroneous. The symptoms produced by the poison of the several kinds of deleterious fish are pretty much the same as those of cholera, but attended with cuticular irritation and eruptions.

The gray snapper (coracinus fuscus) is occasionally poisonous; the conger-eel likewise: in 1791 several persons were poisoned in Grenada by eating of this fish-the negroes, it was observed, who had partaken of it, suffering more gastric derangement than the whites; a circumstance I should have expected, from the greater irritability of the negro stomach, which I have elsewhere had occasion to notice: the mal d'estomac, peculiar to them, is a proof of the susceptibility of that organ to disease. King-fish, scomber maximus, is at certain seasons considered poisonous in Jamaica.

Baracuta at Antigua is reckoned poisonous, and I believe is so from all accounts; yet in the adjacent islands. it is a wholesome fish. This is no proof of the substances it feeds on in the locality of Antigua being of a poisonous nature. Humboldt has remarked, in his South American Travels, that the animals of the same country even, differ often very widely in their nature. In some rivers the caymans are innoxious, in others the reverse; it is the same with the venomous reptiles; but Humboldt does not ascribe this phenomenon to any difference in their food.

Burrows, the best authority on the subject of the

poison of certain fishes, is of opinion that the poison depends not on the substances on which they feed, such as the marine productions, corullina opuntia, hippomane mancinella, or on copper-banks, but on a particular alteration in the secreted fluids, and in the functions at particular periods of these animals,-an alteration which disposes them singularly to speedy putrefaction. It may be well objected to the cominon opinion as to the mineral origin of this poison, that in the waters where these copper-banks are said to exist, no trace of the metal is to be detected in the waters; and fish that has been caught at sea, hundreds of miles from shore, has been found as poisonous as that taken on the banks in question. There can be no doubt, however, of the poisonous nature of the various moluscæ which attach themselves to the copper sheathing of vessels; for here, as it has been observed by Orfila, a large part of their surface is in actual contact with verdigrease; but this is not the case with the other fish I have mentioned; and I think the poison of them may be, with far greater probability of truth, referred to a tendency to putrefaction, arising from some depravity in the secretions at particular periods. Any description of fish in a hot climate, when tainted, becomes poisonous; and, in various hot countries, I have heard of accidents arising from the use of fish that had been long kept; and, in one instance, to my own knowledge, in Damietta, producing the same urticary eruption and numbness of the extremities, which most frequently are observed in those who have eaten of fish that has been discovered to be poisonous.

Of the poisonous plants in this country, to enumerate even the names would occupy many pages. They abound; and the qualities of some of them are better known to the negroes than the whites. Those who

think badly of the negroes speak badly of them; and among the worst things they say of them, is their recourse to the coward's remedy for open wrongs-unawowed revenge. They charge them with secret assas

sinations that extreme length of dishonourable hatred which goes beyond the limits of oral murder, but not beyond the aim of insidious slander. They accuse them of practising on white men's lives of poisoning their masters in the security of their own dwellings. That such perfidy did exist in former times, I believe,— nay, I know, from the lips of an old obeah practiser, that it did exist; but it existed at a time when it was lawful to cut off a man's foot for absenting himself from his master's home,—to slit up his nose for harbouring a runaway,—to cut off his ears for stealing a goat,—and, for a capital offence, to stake him to the ground, and burn him at a slow fire, or hang him in chains, and prolong the agonies of expiring nature for days together; barbarities which have been practised within half a century, and the details of which I have read with my own eyes, in the original record-book of the trials of this period. Some of the friends of the negroes, however, deny that poisoning was ever practised in these countries by the slaves. I agree with them that it was not practised to the extent that has been stated; but that instances have occurred, in which obnoxious overseers and other white persons have been removed by these atrocious means, I have no doubt. The times were barbarous, and the negroes were not the only people whose savagery conformed to them. The negroes have a great disinclination to speak on the subject of obeah, or of poisons.

The gall of the alligator they esteem a virulent poiA plant called whangra, used by obeah men, is of a deleterious quality.

They speak of a poison which may be concealed under the nail, which could be administered by merely putting the finger into any liquid for an instant. It is a curious circumstance, that the lower classes of the Irish have a superstitious idea that "the black" under the nail is a poison. Whether the negro poison, described by Phillips in his African Voyages, in 1694, is of a description similar to that known to the negroes in the West Indies, is

doubtful. Phillips says, the quantity of it necessary to produce death, in one case, will cost the price of four slaves.

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Negroes are said to have frequently committed suicide, by the practice of "dirt-eating." I believe those who practise it are, in all cases, labouring under a disease of the stomach, which depraves its functions. The clay they chiefly eat, is a species of marl, white and friable, a greasy soluble earth, which Brown says, is "the most certain poison, and, when used for any length of time, is so absorbed in the circulation, as to obstruct all the minor capillaries of the body, and to be found even concreted in the glands, and the smaller vessels of the lungs, so as to be sensibly perceptible to the touch." It is probable that the knowledge of many of the poisons of these islands has been derived from the natives by the Maroons: one of the Charaib poisons was extracted from a climbing plant, which was preeminently termed bejuque-the Charaib word for liane. That prepared from the juice of Manchioneel-tree was formerly used by the natives for poisoning their arrows. Tavernier states, that the Indians, by concentrating their poisons more or less, could cause death to ensue at any desired period: the negroes are said to have had the same power. According to Ramusio, the most virulent of the poisons in use amongst them was the ejected saliva of a particular serpent, when irritated. The barbarous use of poisoned arrows was never had recourse to, perhaps, on an occasion less to be regretted than when the first Spaniard in the New World, the Count of Fogeda, fell by a poisoned arrow in pursuit of gold.

The sensitive grass plant which abounds here, according to Piso, is one of the poisons which kill slowly "making people cachectical, short-winded, and melancholy tl they die."

The Manchioneel-tree, Raynal calls the most deadly in its poison: it generally grows on the sea-shore, and renders the water of a dark-brown colour, for a consi

derable space in its vicinity; which colour arises from the tanning, and not from any poisonous ingredient, as is commonly imagined. It is said, the poison, which is the milky juice that exudes through incisions from between the bark and the trunk, when dried, preserves its deleterious properties for a hundred years. The Indians used it for their arrows: the rain that drops from the leaves after a shower, is said to raise blisters on the skin; and the air is so contaminated underneath its branches, that it is dangerous to sleep under its shade. Humboldt perceived the faint, sickly smell of its malaria at some distance from it: the great antidote to this poison is salt.

Cassava, the flour of the Manioc or Jatropha Manihot, is prepared from the tuberose root of the plant. In its raw state it is an acrid poison. When the roots attain their proper size, they are plucked up; they are scraped, washed, and grated: the poisonous principle is in all probability destroyed by the process of roasting the coarse grains: in this state the flour is converted into cakes; and thus an active poison becomes an article of wholesome diet. Brown says that salt of wormwood is a sure antidote to the poison of the Manioc. The roots yield a quantity of starch called tapioca, which is exported by the Brazilians in large grains. The common Acacia or Acacee bush, which abounds in the lowlands, and goes here by the name of Cashaw, is productive of more fatal accidents to cattle than any other plant. In dry weather the cattle feed on the tender shoots without injury, though the milk is supposed to be rendered rank by this food: horses, likewise, in dry weather, may be fed with impunity on the pods, of which they are extremely fond, provided they do not get water for some hours afterwards. Brown says the pods are impregnated with a sticky astringent gum, which may be easily extracted. In Egypt there is a preparation made from the immature pods of the Acacia, called Acacia veravel, which is used as a demulcent. There is a variety of opinions