STROPHANTHUS, a genus of trees, shrubs or climbers, belonging to the family Apocynacea', and found in Asia and Africa, being chiefly tropical. The leaves are feather veined and opposite, and the cymose inflores cence is terminal. The flowers are handsome, ranging in color from white, through the yel low's and reds, to purple. The calyces are glandular, the corollas funnel-shaped, with five lobes tapering into attenuated, long tails. The two carpeled ovaries develop into capsular fruits having two diverging free follicles, which enclose the hairy seeds. A climbing species (S. hispidus) has seeds which are hairy and have a plumose tuft of silky hairs attached to their apexes, by a slender filament and which contain a bitter, poisonous glucoside called strophanthin. This poison contracts the volun tary muscles, and is so deadly that an elephant wounded by the spiked and strophanthus poisoned beams, which are hung for the purpose in the runs of the huge beasts, is unable, it has been stated, to go more than 10 miles from the spot. Species of Strophanthus, especially S. his
pidus, are powerful ingredients of those Afri can arrow-poisons called in West Africa inee, onaye or poison of Pahonias, and in East Africa, Komi* while still another near Somali land is known as wanika poison. Strophanthin is a valuable cardiac stimulant, and a drug em ployed in heart disease, similar in its effects to digitalis, slowing the heart's action, and increas ing its contractility and the tension of the ar teries, but is more rapid and uncertain in its effects than the other drug. Several species are known in gardens and greenhouses, one, S. petersianw, being remarkable for its octopus like twisted corolla lobes, colored red and yellow.