In order to secure a beneficial result, due precautions must be taken not to administer hellebore in cloudy weather; for if given at such a time, it is sure to be productive of excruciating agonies. Indeed there is no doubt that summer is a better time for giving it than winter: the body too, by an abstinence from wine, must be prepared for it seven days previously, emetics being taken on the fourth and third days before, and the patient going without his evening meal the previous day. White hellebore, too, is administered in a sweet[628] medium, though lentils or pottage are found to be the best for the purpose. There has been a plan also, lately discovered, of splitting a radish, and inserting the hellebore in it, after which the sections are pressed together; the object being that the strength of the hellebore may be incorporated with the radish, and modified thereby. At the end of about four hours it generally begins to be brought up again; and within seven it has operated to the full extent. Administered in this manner, it is good for epilepsy, as already[629] stated, vertigo, melancholy, insanity, delirium, white elephantiasis, leprosy, tetanus, palsy, gout, dropsy, incipient tympanitis, stomachic affections, cynic spasms,[630] sciatica, quartan fevers which defy all other treatment, chronic coughs, flatulency, and recurrent gripings in the bowels. CHAP. 25.—TO WHAT PERSONS HELLEBORE SHOULD NEVER BE ADMINISTERED. It is universally recommended not to give hellebore to aged people or children, to persons of a soft and effeminate habit of body or mind, or of a delicate or tender constitution. It is given less frequently too to females than to males; and persons of a timorous disposition are recommended not to take it: the same also, in cases where the viscera are ulcerated or tumefied, and more particularly when the patient is afflicted with spitting of blood, or with maladies of the side or fauces. Hellebore is applied, too, externally, with salted axle-grease, to morbid eruptions of the body and suppurations of long standing: mixed with polenta, it destroys rats and mice. The people of Gaul, when hunting, tip their arrows with hellebore, taking care to cut away the parts about the wound in the animal so slain: the flesh, they say, is all the more tender for it. Flies are destroyed with white hellebore, bruised and sprinkled about a place with milk: phthiriasis is also cured by the use of this mixture. CHAP. 26. (6.)—THE MITHRIDATIA. Crateuas ascribes the discovery of one plant to Mithridates himself, the name of which is “mithridatia.”[631] Near the root it has two leaves resembling those of the acanthus, between which it puts forth a stem supporting a flower at the extremity, like a rose. CHAP. 27.—THE SCORDOTIS OR SCORDION: FOUR REMEDIES.