238 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



While it was generally held that all fern-like plants are seedless, this 

 one seems to have been popularly credited with shedding seeds 

 regularly on one particular night of the year. Thus runs Tragus' 

 own story: 



:< Inasmuch as all writers about herbs have said that ferns pro- 

 duce neither flowers nor seeds, I have thought it worth while to place 

 on record, for the information of botanists, an account of my own 

 experiences, which prove the contrary. For four years in succession 

 I kept vigil all the night preceding the Feast of St. John Baptist. 1 

 and always found in the very early morning, before the break of day, 

 very minute black seeds, not so very unlike poppy seeds lying on 

 the pieces of cloth, and the mullein leaves which, in order that I 

 might not miss the seeds, I had placed under the plants beforehand. 

 Some of the ferns had shed no seeds at all; others had deposited 

 them by the hundred. Moreover, in these experiments, I employed 

 no cabalistics, no conjurings, no incantations, no superstitious 

 observances of any kind, nor did any one of the three companions of 

 my vigils; but having made a fire we watched and waited, some- 

 times finding none, at other times a few here, and many there. Why 

 there should be such a diversity in the yield of seed, and what the 

 purpose of nature may be in all this matter, I do not understand. " 2 



This account incidentally reveals it that in middle Europe in 

 the sixteenth century there still flourished the ancient profession 

 of the root and herb gatherer, in the practice of its old time 

 superstitions; that men believed that under the sacred spell of 

 the summer-solstitial midnight such flowerless and seedless herbs 

 as ferns, by help of solemn incantation could be made to scatter 

 seeds ; these presumed to be efficacious in medicine or magic. Tragus, 

 the inquirer and reformer, half believing and half disbelieving, 

 investigated the matter, proving to his own satisfaction that ferns 

 bear seeds ; that they produce them naturally, without the prompt- 

 ings of conjuration; yet it seems not to have occurred even to our 

 reformer botanist to look for fern seeds in the day time, or at night 

 except on that immediately preceding St. John's Day! 



The distinction, indicated so long ago by Theophrastus, between 

 plants with one seed leaf and those with two, though never again 

 brought forward prominently until long after Tragus, had not been 

 ignored by him. It had been the cereals and their kindred to 

 which the Greek had ascribed the one seed leaf as a universal 



1 The 24th of June; otherwise called, at least in Old England, Midsummer 

 Day. 



2 Ibid., p. 544. 



