Soo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



little to say; they are of a class so foreign, that though often loud- 

 spoken, as foreigners sometimes become, they are not botanists to the 

 manor born and never will become anything but sutlers. 



Far back in the early centuries, men looked at plants largely from 

 the standpoint of utility, and every plant not useful for food was sup- 

 posed to have some virtues of the healing sort that made it useful 

 medicinally. Doubtless many of these notions came from the real 

 presence of some remedial virtues, for many plants of the pharmacopeia 

 were known to the ancients; but in attributing so many virtues to so 

 many harmless succulents, one wonders sometimes just how far the 

 principle of dishonest graft entered into the dealings of the old sim- 

 plers with their nostrums. At any rate, volume after volume of 

 herbals was published, illustrating many common and often rare 

 plants, and sometimes in a very realistic way their real or sup- 

 posed effects on the human system. A few illustrations of these 

 from among the works of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 

 turies may not be amiss. Porta in 1591 published page after page 

 of illustrations showing fancied resemblances between plants and all 

 sorts of human and animal parts, and often the discovery of such a 

 similarity to some part of the human frame led to the unwarranted 

 conclusion that the Almighty thus pointed out to mortals a definite 

 specific in the plant thus possessing this resemblance. One of the 

 favorites among these early medicinal frauds was the supposition that 

 because the delicate stems and branches of the maidenhair fern were 

 really hair-like, one had only to steep them in water to supply an 

 effective hair tonic which, for growing copious and lustrous hair and 

 preventing incipient baldness, would place the danderines and herpi- 

 cides of these degenerate days sadly in the shade ! 



Many of these early herbals were printed in Latin as the standard 

 language of medicine and learning generally, but later they were 

 printed in the vernacular of the country in which they were writ- 

 ten, and often something symbolic of the particular plant they il- 

 lustrated was added to appeal more strongly to the mind of the 

 reader. We give an illustration from one of the larger herbals of 

 the sixteenth century, that of Hieronymus Bock (1587) in old Ger- 

 man, depicting with the apple the serpent and death that was supposed 

 to have been brought into the world by eating this really delicious 

 fruit. We also give a quotation from Parkinson (1640), whose Eng- 

 lish herbal is perhaps the most complete compendium of the folk-lore 

 of plants and all the other old dames' fancies concerning the English 

 flora that was ever written. Here every plant description and history 

 is followed by an account of its ' virtues,' often set forth in exaggerated 

 terms. 



Concerning Salvinia natans, which he describes and figures as 

 'Lens palustris latifolia punctata/ Parkinson says: 



