FERNS, AND THEIR ALLIES, SQ 



ascribed to fern seed many strange properties, some 

 of which the rustick virgins have not yet forgotten, or 

 exploded." Ben Jonson alludes to the invisibility 

 of those who carry fern seed, thus : — • 



" I had 

 No medicine, sir, to go invisible, 

 No fern seed in my pocket," 



Other properties are also ascribed to fern seed, 

 which were taken into account in the operations of 

 Midsummer Eve. " Fern seed," says Grose, " is 

 looked on as having great magical powers, and must 

 be gathered on Midsummer Eve. A person who 

 went to gather it reported that the spirits whisked 

 by his ears, and sometimes struck his hat, and other 

 parts of his body ; and, at length, when he thought 

 he had got a good quantity of it, and secured it in 

 papers and a box, when he came home he found 

 both empty." Torreblanca, in his " Demonology," 

 suspects those persons of witchcraft who gather fern 

 seed on this night. Brand says, " A respectable 

 countryman at Heston, in Middlesex, informed me, 

 in June, 1793, that, when he was a young man, he 

 w^as often present at the ceremony of catching the 

 fern seed at midnight, on the eve of St. John 

 Baptist. The attempt, he said, w^as often unsuccessful, 

 for the seed was to fall into the plate of its own 

 accord, and that, too, without shaking the plant." 



In an old translation of Pliny it is written, "of 

 feme be two kinds, and they beare neither floure nor 

 seed." The ancients, who often paid more attention 

 to received opinions than to the evidence of their 

 senses, believed that fern bore no seed. Our ancestors 



