CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

YEW

Description. It grows to be an irregular tree, spreading widley into branches. The leaves are long, narrow, and placed with a beautiful regularity. The flowers are yellowish, and the berries are surrounded with a sweet juicy matter.

Place. We have it growing in woods, and in the gardens, but its usual ancient residence is the church-yard: conjectures upon the antiquity and origin of which plantatin, has brought forth much pedantic nonsense; Gray observes this in the Grave, a Poem, when he says,

"Well do I know thee by thy trusty Yew,
"Shading for years thy gloomy church-yard view;
"Cheerless, unsocial plant, that loves to dwell
"Where scatter'd bones man's dissolution tell".

Government and virtues. This is a tree of Saturn. The leaves are said to be poisonous; but the wood, if it grew with more regularity would be very valuable. This tree, though it has no place among the physical plants, yet does it not deserve (at least in our climate) so bad a character as the ancients give it, viz. a most poisonous vegetable, the berries of which threaten present death to man and beast that eat them; many in this country having eaten them and survived. However that be, it has very powerful poisonous qualities, that rise by distillation. In this form it is the most active vegetable poison known in the whole world, for in a very small dose it instantly induces death without any previous disorder; and its deleterious power seems to act entirely upon the nervous system, and without exciting the least inflammation in the part to which it more immediately enters. It totally differs from opium and all other sleepy poisons, for it does not bring on the lethargic symptoms, but more effectually penetrates and destroys the vital functions, without immediately affecting the animal. These observations would not have been made, or the article inserted here, but to caution against any rash application of it, for though it is sometimes given usefull in obstructions of the liver and bilious complaints, those experiments seem too few to recommend it to be used without the greatest caution. The deleterious qualities of laurel-water are more than equalled by this.