Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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This poisonous property of the honey is said to be derived by the bees from the flowers of a species of rhododendron (Azalea pontica), all of which possess narcotic properties.

Supposing that blind old Homer—if ever there was an old Homer, and if blind, no matter—knew the secret of Egyptian Thebes, and the power of the narcotic hemp, and yet never smoked a hubble-bubble, it is of little consequence, except to the Society of Antiquaries, and certainly makes no difference to Homer now. Although Diagoras condemned Hippocrates for giving too much opium to his patients, we are not informed whether it was administered in the shape of “Tinctura opii,” or “Confectio opii,” or “Extractum opii,” or “Godfrey’s cordial,” or “Paregoric elixir.” The discovery would not lengthen our own lives, and therefore we do not repine. We think that we have some consolation left, in that we are wiser than Homer or Hippocrates in respect of that particular vanity, called “shag tobacco,” which, we venture to suggest, neither of those venerable sages ever indulged in during the period of their natural lives. And although Herodotus found the Scythians using, in a strange manner, the tops of the hemp plant, he never got so far as Kamtschatka, and therefore never saw a man getting drunk upon a toadstool. If he had ever seen it, he had never slept till he had told it to that posterity which he has left us to enlighten.