This plant is a bushy, smooth, fetid, annual plant, 2 or 3 feet in height, and in rich soil even more.

Stramonium is a well-known poisonous weed, growing in all parts of the United States, along roadsides, waste grounds, etc.,

Its native country is unknown. It is found growing in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. The whole plant has an unpleasant, fetid, narcotic odor, which diminishes upon drying. Almost every part of the plant is possessed of medicinal properties, but the official parts are the leaves and seeds. The leaves should be gathered when the flowers are full blown, and carefully dried in the shade.

Datura fatuosa (more) is employed in India by a brotherhood of thieves and murderers—the Daturiahs, successors of the Thugs, or Phansigars, who formerly waylaid and strangled their victims. The powdered seeds are mixed with flour and given with food.

Cerebral irritation; furious raging and destructive delirium; face deeply congested, red, and bloated; loquaciousness; restlessness and fearfulness; superficial and localized pain; spasms with pain; convulsive cough; purely spasmodic asthma; the opium habit.

In no instances are the full physiologic doses necessary except in the cure of the opium habit, when the drug may be pushed to the full limit of endurance. It remains to be seen whether permanent damage may be done to the intellectual faculties from such dosage, as is the case with atropine.

This use of the agent produces excessive expectoration, and also marked nervous phenomena, such as vertigo, nausea, determination of blood to the brain and stupor. In plethoric patients these induced symptoms are sometimes violent and even dangerous. It is sometimes burned in conjunction with potassium nitrate, to enhance its effects.

In toxic doses there is hallucination which may be of a merry or violent nature. There is a flushed face, injected eyes, pupils are dilated, perversion of sight follows in which everything may appear reddish or greenish. The action of stramonium is similar to that of belladonna and here, too, we have the characteristic rash of the latter. Stupor followed by coma, and in severe cases convulsions and death follow.

Datura stramonium is now found throughout most parts of the temperate civilized world. It was found in America, where the settlers near Jamestown, Virginia, used it as a pot herb, the resulting deaths so advertising it as to create the common name, still in use, Jamestown or Jimson weed.

De Candolle (186) decided that stramonium was indigenous to the Old World, probably bordering the Caspian Sea, but not of India nor yet of Europe at the time of the classical period

Many European botanists refer it to North America, while we in return trace it to the old continent. Nuttall considers it as having originated in South America or Asia, and it is probable that its native country is to be found in some part of the East. It is said to grow wild, abundantly in Southern Russia, from the borders of the Black Sea eastward to Siberia. Its seeds, being retentive of life, are taken in the earth put on shipboard for ballast from one country to another, not infrequently springing up upon the passage, and thus propagating the plant in all regions which have any commercial connection. In the United States it is found everywhere in the vicinity of cultivation frequenting dung heaps, the road sides and commons, and other places where a rank soil is created by the deposited refuse of towns and villages. I

Under the names of Man t'o lo fa, Wan t'o lo hua, and Nau yeung fa, the Chinese use as a medicine the flowers of the Datura alba

El Bethene, a Datura of the Sahara Desert, is capable of causing delirium, coma, and death, and it is probable that all the species of the genus are poisonous.

J. S. Ward has found commercial stramonium leaves freely adulterated with those of Carthamus helenioides and Xanthium Strumarium.