Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/447

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PENTANDRIA.
417

among the most deadly of poisons; according to the remark of Linnæus, who detected the cause of a dreadful disorder among horned cattle in Lapland, in their eating young leaves of Cicuta virosa, Engl. Bot. t. 479, under water.

Botanists in general shrink from the study of the Umbelliferæ, nor have these plants much beauty in the eyes of amateurs; but they will repay the trouble of a careful observation. The late M. Cusson of Montpellier bestowed more pains upon them than any other botanist has ever done; but the world has, as yet, been favoured with only a part of his remarks. His labours met with a most ungrateful check, in the unkindness, and still more mortifying stupidity, of his wife, who, on his absence from home, is recorded to have destroyed his whole herbarium, scraping off the dried specimens, for the sake of the paper on which they were pasted!

3. Trigynia is illustrated by the Elder, the Sumach or Rhus, Viburnum, &c., also Corrigicla, Engl. Bot. t. 668, and Tamarix, t. 1318, of which last one species, has 10 stamens.