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The same plant, as well as other tender plants, such as the garden pea and kidney bean, when subject to the influence of this acid, quickly wither and die, and the laurel-water has the same effect upon them. It appears also that plants which naturally contain the acid, such as the cherry-laurel and almond tree, are not less susceptible of its poisonous action than others.
Some physicians place great confidence in the medicines called refrigerants. In equal esteem are the syrups of orgeat, lemons, and vinegar, to which may be added cherry-laurel water, when given in proper and gradually-increasing doses. Hemlock, camphor, and agnus-castus, have likewise been much recommended as moderators of the sexual appetite.
Darwin may be credited, the Cumaean Sybil never sat on the portending tripod without first swallowing a few drops of juice of the cherry-laurel.
With opium, belladonna, brucaea, snake-wood, and the cherry-laurel, they put to sleep all who stand in their way. There is not one of those women, Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek, whom here you call 'good women, who do not know how, by means of chemistry, to stupefy a doctor, and in psychology to amaze a confessor."
There is every reason to believe that the Pagan priesthood were under the influence of some narcotic preparation during the display of their oracular power, but the effects produced would seem rather to resemble those of opium, or perhaps of stramonium, than of prussic acid, which the cherry-laurel water is known to contain.
The two Goat-moth caterpillars, of similar structure, have entirely different stomachic aptitudes; "the exclusive portion of the one is the oak and of the other the hawthorn or the cherry-laurel."
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