90 The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock. [Sess. 



things with regard to the leek of Wales. The veneration for 

 the leek goes back to the very dawn of history. The children 

 of Israel mourned in the wilderness that they had no leeks to 

 eat. ' Slavery with leeks was better than freedom without. 

 In Book X. of the ' Odyssey,' the enchantress, Circe, changed 

 the followers of Ulysses into pigs by giving them a drug, 

 Mandragora officinalis — a stemless kind of Belladona ; but the 

 hero himself remained unaffected by the poison, because he had 

 concealed in the folds of his dress the sacred plant, the leek, 

 which Homer tells us the gods call " moly." 



The origin of the belief in leeks is twofold. (1) In early 

 times vegetables were scarce. Primitive men lived on flesh, 

 fish, or shellfish. The leek was the first vegetable cultivated, 

 and was therefore highly valued. (2) Primitive man had also 

 a horror of the wilderness, and a love of the cluster of huts, 

 where alone he was safe from wild beasts. The edible leek 

 was adopted as the type of the little hamlet, with its patch of 

 ground where pot-herbs grew. The poisonous mandrake is the 

 type of the wilderness, where dwelt savage beasts, the enemies 

 of man (see Gen. xxx. 14). Mr John S. Glennie informs me 

 that even in the present day boys in Greece often wear bits of 

 leek in their caps, to avert bad luck ; and that a similar effect 

 is obtained by pronouncing the word " skorodon," or leek. 



~No races can be more unlike than the two Celtic nations of 

 Britain — the Welsh with their leeks, the Irish with their 

 shamrock : the one sedate, reticent, retiring ; the other reck- 

 less, fickle, enterprising. They are as unlike as were the 

 Dorians and Ionians of ancient Greece. From their favourite 

 letters, Professor Ehys has called the Welsh the P Celts, and 

 the Irish and Highlanders the Q Celts ; so the Dorians might 

 be called the P Greeks, and the Ionians the Q Greeks. 



In conclusion, if one botanical species is to be taken as the 

 emblem of each one of the four nations, I would select Eosa 

 arvensis for England, Cnicus arvensis for Scotland, Trifolium 

 filiforme for Ireland, and Allium porrum for Wales. You will 

 notice that the English and the Scotch have adopted thorny, 

 spiny plants, suitable to their hard, angular characters ; whereas 

 the poetical Irish have chosen the graceful trefoil, with its early 

 Christian associations, and the Welsh have selected a plant 

 useful rather than beautiful, as if their aspirations were after 



