328 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
reading Beauvilliers’ book on cookery, from which I find, as I 
suspected, that garlic is power.” In November, 1810, he 
had said to Lady Grey, “I am performing miracles in my parish 
with garlic for whooping cough.” Likewise from York, in 1818, 
“We conquered here the whooping cough with a pennyworth 
of salt of tartar; after having filled the sufferers in vain with Dr. 
Alford’s expensive poisons. What an odd thing that such a 
simple specific should not be more known!” Again, writing 
from Heslington, 1813, he tells his friend Jeffreys, ‘I have been 
Spending some weeks of dissipation in London, and was trans- 
formed by Circe’s cup, not into a brute, but a beau. Fam now 
eating the herb moly in the country.” Wild garlic, allium moly, 
represents the fabled moly of Homer as given by Hermes to 
Odysseus for counteracting the spells of Circe. 
It is to the intensely-smelling sulphuret of allyl that garlic 
and the onion owe their peculiar odour; and the rank aroma of 
the breath after eating these plants is caused by the constant 
presence of such oil in minute quantities exhaled from the lungs 
into the air; it exudes likewise through the pores of the garlic- 
eater’s skin, and characterises the perspiration. The odour is 
so diffusible that it is given off from the lungs even when garlic 
is applied to the soles of the feet only. If sniffed into the nostrils 
it will revive an hysterical sufferer. The smell thereof is the 
most acrimonious of all the onion tribe. Many marvellous 
effects, and healing powers have been ascribed to garlic, the 
leek, and onions, their juices and preparations. Amongst 
physiological results it is reported that garlic makes the eye 
retina more sensitive, and less able to bear strong light. Dr. 
Pearse, of Plymouth, 1902, has reported concerning the remark- 
able longings of the Irish peasantry for garlic, and their faith 
in its value for curing coughs. During twenty-five years his 
experience has met with the same craving in consumptively 
inclined patients at Plymouth ; he concludes that there must 
be some state of molecular energy in the leek, and onions, which 
serves to furnish the body of a consumptive person with the 
true correlative for maintaining healthy growth. ‘ Such,” 
he adds, “is the craving for onions by consumptive patients, 
and such the agreement of these odorous bulbs therewith, that 
I do not doubt that this is an instance parallel with that of the 
Swiss, who by some instinct, or evolved experience, have learnt 
to eat burnt sponge for the dispersion of their throat goitre, or 
