What we know for surest with regard to their medicinal practice is, that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to soothe, they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, _The Comforters_, or Solaneæ.[42] [42] Man’s ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other plants have come into use: a hundred exotic vegetables have become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor _Comforters_ is clean forgotten!--Nay, who now remembers or even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless nature? The _Asclepias acida_, _Sarcostemma_, or flesh-plant, which for five thousand years was the _Holy Wafer_ of the East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred millions of men,--this plant, in the Middle Ages called the Poison-queller (_vince-venenum_), meets with not one word of historical comment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois on the _Soma_ of India and the _Hom_ of Persia. _Mem. de l’Académie des Inscriptions_, xix. 326. A vast and popular family, many kinds of which abound to excess under our feet, in the hedges, everywhere--a family so numerous that of one kind alone we have eight hundred varieties.[43] There is nothing easier, nothing more common, to find. But these plants are mostly dangerous in the using. It needs some boldness to measure out a dose, the boldness, perhaps, of genius. [43] M. d’Orbigny’s _Dictionary of Natural History_, article _Morelles_. Let us, step by step, mount the ladder of their powers.[44] The first are simply pot-herbs, good for food, such as the mad-apples and the tomatoes, miscalled “love-apples.” Other, of the harmless kinds, are sweetness and tranquillity itself, as the white mullens, or lady’s fox-gloves, so good for fomentations. [44] I have found this ladder nowhere else. It is the more important, because the witches who made these essays at the risk of passing for poisoners, certainly began with the weakest, and rose gradually to the strongest. Each step of power thus gives its relative date, and helps us in this dark subject to set up a kind of chronology. I shall complete it in the following chapters, when I come to speak of the Mandragora and the Datura. I have chiefly followed Pouchet’s _Solanées_ and _Botanique Générale_.