Concept
Conium maculatum
Overview
Conium maculatum, commonly known as hemlock (British English) or poison hemlock (in North America), is a highly poisonous flowering plant and a nitrophile weed species in the carrot family Apiaceae.
The plant is herbaceous, with no woody parts, and has a biennial lifecycle. Under the right conditions, the plant grows quite rapidly during the growing season and can reach heights of 2.4 metres (8 feet) with a long penetrating root. The plant has a distinctive odour that is usually considered unpleasant and carries with the wind. The hollow stems are usually spotted dark maroon and turn dry and brown after the plant completes its biennial lifecycle.
Native to Europe and North Africa, hemlock is a hardy plant that can live in a variety of environments. It is widely naturalised outside its native range, including in Australia, West Asia, and North and South America, where it can become an invasive weed.
All parts of the plant are toxic, particularly the seeds and roots, and especially when ingested. Hemlock is well-known as the poison that killed the philosopher Socrates after his trial in Ancient Greece.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
No less esteemed, too, in the same country, is a certain kind of thorn,[856] though only the black variety, its wood being imperishable, in water even, a quality which renders it particularly valuable for making the sides of ships: on the other hand, the white kinds will rot very rapidly. It has sharp, prickly thorns on the leaves even, and bears its seeds in pods; they are employed for the same purposes as galls in…
the Elder Pliny, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3
Close in meaning to Conium maculatum; the term itself is not named.
The common herd of mankind would seem to fancy, as in Nature there are certain types of all animal and vegetable substances, and the botanist has no difficulty in classing such a plant, for example, as the _conium maculatum_; and the natural historian can readily pronounce that such a bird is the _alcedo Ispida_; that the physician, in like manner, upon examining the characteristic features of any case, should have…
Hippocrates, The genuine works of Hippocrates, Vol. 1
States what Conium maculatum is.
Compare, for instance, the mossy and viscid calyx of a moss-rose, which suddenly appears through bud-variation on a Provence-rose, with the gall of red moss growing from the inoculated leaf of a wild rose, with each filament symmetrically branched like a microscopical spruce-fir, bearing a glandular tip and secreting odoriferous gummy matter.[54] Or compare, on the one hand, the fruit of the peach, with its hairy…
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
Close in meaning to Conium maculatum; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Conium maculatum
Related ideas
- Ancient Greek
- American English
- Northern Ireland
- North Africa
- Ohio State University
- Old English
- Greek mythology
- Socrates
- Trial of Socrates
- University of California, Berkeley
- West Asia
- British English
- Georgia (country)
- Carl Linnaeus
- Wiley (publisher)
- Ancient Greece
- Central Asia
- Cambridge University Press
- Jacques-Louis David
- Europe
Place in the tradition
Part of Exclusivism.