“If your wish be rest, Lettuce and cowslip wine probatum est.”
Pope.
Before describing any of the imitations of opium, or substitutes for it in any form, it will not be out of place to notice briefly the tinctures in popular use in which that drug forms a prominent ingredient.Laudanum is the spirituous infusion, and contains the active ingredients of a twelfth part of its weight of opium. Scotch paregoric elixir is a solution in ammoniated spirit, and is only one-fifth of the strength of laudanum, containing, therefore, one part in sixty of opium. English paregoric is a tincture of opium and camphor, and is four times weaker still. The black drop, and Battley’s sedative liquor, are believed to be solutions of opium in vegetable acids, and to possess, the one of them, four, and the other, three times the strength of laudanum. Although some good authorities consider this an exaggerated computation of the strength of the latter two, and that they are not more than half that strength.200 There are several other pharmaceutical preparations into which opium enters as a component, but to which it is unnecessary to refer. Those already named, as has before been intimated, are used not a little, to still the sounds of those miniature human organs so distasteful to bachelor ears. The practice, unfortunately so prevalent, of soothing infants with preparations of opium, cannot be too strongly deprecated. We are ready to express our surprise that oriental mothers should transfer their cigars from their own mouths to those of their infants, that the helpless little creatures may enjoy the luxury of a suck, while, at the same time, we are inuring them to the use of a far more insidious and deadly poison. Rather let us for the future, when inclined to charge this as a crime upon others, remember that scene which took place eighteen hundred years ago, and the rebuke with which it closed, in words written with the finger upon the ground, “Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone at her.”
 
One of the most important of opium substitutes is derived from a plant in itself not only harmless, but extensively used as an article of food: it is Lactucarium or Lettuce Opium, and is prepared generally from the wild lettuce, although similar properties exist to a more limited extent in the cultivated varieties which find their way to our tables.
 
There is no certainty about the period at which lettuce was introduced into this country, although the time has been fixed at 1520, when it is stated to have been brought from Flanders. In the early part of the reign of Henry VIII., when Queen Katherine wished for a salad, she despatched a messenger to Holland or Flanders; at that period, therefore, very few English tables could ever boast201 the honour of a salad. In the privy purse expenses of Henry VIII., in 1530, an item occurs from which we learn that the gardener of York Place received a reward for bringing “lettuze” and cherries to Hampton Court. This was policy on the part of the King, his royal consort having a liking for salads, for it was rather expensive as well as tedious, to send for them to the gardens of Brabant.22 In 1600, peas, beans, and lettuce were in common use in England; and in 1652, a writer of the time speaks of lettuce as a plant with which the public generally had been long familiar. One variety of the cultivated lettuce was doubtless derived from the island of Cos, inasmuch as it still bears that name.
 
Lettuces were known to the ancients. Dioscorides and Theophrastus speak of them as cultivated by the Greeks, and also used in medicine; the prickly lettuce is still found wild on the higher hills of Greece, and was probably one of the species to which the above-named ancient authors refer. Several varieties of the garden lettuce were used in salads by both Greeks and Romans. The pride of the garden of Aristoxenus was his lettuces, and he irrigated them with wine.
 
Two species of wild lettuce are found in Britain, the acrid and the prickly lettuce, both of which possess similar properties, yielding a juice from which lactucarium may be prepared. Two other wild species are only occasional. The lactucarium202 of the London Pharmacop?ia is prepared only from the garden lettuce, but the acrid lettuce is stated to yield a much larger quantity and of superior quality. A single plant of the garden lettuce will yield only 17 grains of lactucarium, on an average, while a plant of the acrid lettuce yields no less than 56 grains, or more than three times that quantity; and although the milkiness of the juice increases till the very close of the time of flowering, or till the month of October in this climate, the value of the lactucarium is deteriorated after the middle of the period of flowering, for subsequently, while the juice becomes thicker, a material decrease takes place in the proportion of bitter extract contained in it.
 
Lactucarium is a reddish brown substance with a narcotic odour and bitter taste, having a considerable resemblance to opium. On analysis it yields a snow white crystalline substance called lactucin, which is narcotic in its effects. Dr. Duncan recommended the use of lactucarium as a substitute for opium, the anodyne properties of which it possesses, without being followed with the same injurious effects. In France, a water is distilled from lettuce, and used as a mild sedative. Experiments of the effects of lettuce-opium upon animals are detailed by Orfila, who states that three drachms introduced into the stomach of a dog killed it in two days, without causing any remarkable symptoms; two drachms applied to a wound in the back induced giddiness, slight sopor, and death in three days; and thirty-six grains injected, in a state of solution, into the jugular vein caused dulness, weakness, slight convulsions, and death in 18 minutes.
 
In North America the prickly lettuce is more common than with us, and from it the American lactucarium is extracted. In Guinea a species of203 lettuce is found wild, possessing precisely similar properties, and applicable to a like use. This plant is largely used by the negroes as a salad and also as an opiate.
 
The plants cultivated for the sake of the juice are grown in a rich soil, with a southern aspect. In such a situation they thrive vigorously, and send up thick, juicy, flower stems. As soon as these have attained a considerable height, and before the flowers expand, a portion of the top is cut off. The milky juice quickly exudes from the wound, while the heat of the sun renders it so viscid that, instead of flowing down, it concretes on the stem in a brownish flake. After it has acquired a proper consistence it is removed. As the juice closes up the vessels of the plant, another slice is taken off lower down the stem, and the juice again flows freely and another flake is formed. The same process is repeated as long as the plant affords any juice. To the crude juice, thus obtained, the name of lactucarium has been given.
 
“This,” says Johnston,204 “is one of those narcotics in which many of us unconsciously indulge. The eater of green lettuce as a salad, takes a portion of it in the juice of the leaves he swallows; and many of my readers, after this is pointed out to them, will discover that their heads are not unaffected after indulging copiously in a lettuce salad. Eaten at night, the lettuce causes sleep; eaten during the day, it soothes and calms and allays the tendency to nervous irritability. And yet the lover of lettuce would take it very much amiss if he were told that he ate his green leaves, partly at least, for the same reason as the Turk or the Chinaman takes his whiff from the tiny opium pipe: that, in short, he was little better than an opium-eater, and his purveyor than the opium smuggler on the coast of China.”
 
Lest this should occasion some alarm in the breasts of those who prefer their lobsters with a salad, let us strive to administer a little consolation. We have seen that the cultivated or garden lettuce does not contain so much as one third the quantity of lactucarium yielded by the wild species, ten good lettuces must therefore be eaten before sufficient extract will have been consumed to have killed a dog in two days. This is upon the presumption that the lettuces eaten as salad are in precisely the same condition, and capable of affording the same amount of the extract as when cultivated specially for that purpose; but this is not the case, it is not until just before flowering that the full amount of juice is contained in the plant, a per centage only of which exists in the younger plants as gathered for the table. Nor is that quantity of the same narcotic quality as in the more matured plant, which has collected, at that period, all its strength properly to produce, and bring to perfection, its flowers and fruit.
 
“Nothing hath got so far,
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey.
His eyes dismount the highest star,
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.
“More servants wait on man
Than he’ll take notice of: in every path
He treads down that which doth befriend him,
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh, mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.”
The lacticiferous or milk bearing plants are nearly all of them connected by very important ties with man and civilization. The phenomena themselves are well worthy of study, and their205 association with humanity replete with interest. These plants are by no means restricted to one genus or family, nor are their properties of the same character. The one circumstance of their secreting a white juice resembling milk in appearance is almost all they have in common. In the poppy it becomes opium, in the lettuce lactucarium. It constitutes refreshing beverages, obtained in large quantities, in the sunny climes of Asia, from the cow-tree of South America, the kiriaghuma and hya-hya of British Guiana, the Euphorbia balsamifera of the Canary Islands, the juice of which as a sweet milk, or evaporated to a jelly, is taken as a great delicacy, and the Banyan tree, all of which, to a certain extent, supply the place of the cow, in places and conditions wherein cows are not to be found. Similar juices are collected in the form of India rubber or caoutchouc, a substance so invaluable in the arts of life. They exude from figs, euphorbi?, and cacti, in the East Indies, South America, and Africa, from all of which places a large quantity of the consolidated juice is exported to the markets of Europe and North America. The greater quantity of these lactescent juices are elaborated in the Tropics. Gutta percha and allied substances are similarly produced, and indeed, numerous plants are possessed of this kind of secretion, which have not yet been made available for economical purposes, but which may become equally well kno............