Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1895 — A Peculiar Affliction. [ARTICLE]

A Peculiar Affliction.

Of the 4,000 soldiers lying in the hospitals at Madagascar a great many suffer from abscesses on the legs, caused by grass seeds having sharp barbs which enter the flesh. This is news, though it is not new. Before the war many creoles, working in the gold mines there, lost some of their toes, and sometimes half the foot, in consequence of wounds inflicted by the tiny points of such poisonous grass seeds.