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Show r IUI A POISONOUS PLANT. Dangers of tha Deceptive Poison Ivy. It la Easily Mlatakeik tor the Innc- cent Virginia Creeper and tlie ' Careleae Plenioker Cornea to Grief. Desperate before the rashness of youth, parents make short work of argument. t "Some plants are poisonous; we cannot can-not Bay this one is not; therefore, wc decide that it is poisonous, and charge you all to neither touch nor handle it." The brighter and prettier the plant the more suspicious; as if its attraction! were only meant to beguile human creatures to tlwir ruin. The other d A3 I heard a reverend gentleman of bool..-telling bool..-telling his boys that the beautiful cat-brier cat-brier is a deailljr poison; and another forbade the children to pick the pretty bush honeysuckle everywhere in blos- " "boiii. Throughout years of "kidhood" and subjection to dooryard supervision those warnings carry weight, especially . with the girls. Hut the bold, bad boy turned loose in summer Edens picks, eats and does not surely dio. Then all the warnings are tossd over together A and he continues a scoiTer until one day, ; after a debauch nt the pond, he conies homo covered from toe to crown with K' :the virus of sumach, humble and sore. , It would -have. been, after all, very simple to touch him the truth in the beginning, be-ginning, for' we have, in fact, only two native plants in the United States which are poisonous to the touch, and but one of these is likely to be met with. The one, however, is so oxuni- I circumstance that increase liability to danger from it is the variability of its aspect; another is its resemblance to the innocent Virginia creeper. Both are freely mingled on our roadsides. Popularly they are both vines, but that term belongs only to the creeper; that is strictly a vin, with all the grace and suppleness of the wild grape, to which, it is nearly related. It has the Rnne long, finger-like tendrils waving seductively about to find some chonc support, and rosettes of palm-shaped leaves, as if a grape leaf had been cut into five portions set with fine saw teeth along the edge. On the contrary, con-trary, Rhus has three leaflets, the end one the largest and remote from the others, all irregularly and coarsely toothed. No two of the leaves are just alike. It has no tendrils, but climbs, like Knglish ivy, by little bristling rootlets which sprout all along the main stem, and eventually cover it lika moss. These rootlets penetrate posits or bark of trees, and cling there so tightly that the plant cannot be torn off without difficulty. N. Y. Tost. present that the terror of its name cov-v cov-v era half the lovely wild tilings that 1 ought to be our summer delight. It is known as poison ivy, and it grows everywhere, east and south, as well as upon the Pacific elope, where it differs a little from the eastern species. Its habitat hab-itat is almost unlimited, but it prefers Bunny, sandy tracts, on . mountains, pasture or coaat. It spreads by the roadside, perches on fence posts, twhero it has long reigned, just beyond the reach of tlve plow; elimbs trees and, waving from their boughs, threatens the passing carriage; slides into the orchard among the daisies, wraps itself about the rooks. Mercury vine is one of its old names, and well suited to its slippery and insidious habits. When the picnicker in romantic groves stretches his tired limbs ho finds hois lying upon a bed of ivy; he pulls himself him-self up a hill by a tough shrub which ho finds, to his horror, is poison vine. If he kindles his fire the brush may be full of it, and it is particularly poisonous when burning. In order to avoid such a pest every child ought to be taught to recognize it. Rhus toxicodendron, Greek and CeJtic for red poison bush, is its name in botany and in medicine. It is an active, ac-tive, acrid poison, leaving upon the skin u crowd of minute watery blisters, which may pass through neveral stages of malignancy. Borne persons are never poisoned by it; others are sometimes poisoned, and yet others cannot even pass it In certain stages of its growth without being affected. Often it results in long and painful ill-u::s; ill-u::s; in rare cases it is fatal. On |