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That is, I think, all the direct evidence for Moly, except 
other imitative passages in Greek and Latin poets, and a late 
relief, representing Odysseus with the Moly, tantalizing be- 
cause the work is too rough to help us even to the latter-day 
conception of Moly. 
The inference we draw is that, to Homer, the true believer 
in magic, Moly was just some strange and potent herb. For 
the later botanists there was a plant called by the same 
name, of the garlic tribe, perhaps, Alliwm Scorodoprasum, 
perhaps, Golden Garlic, as Alphonse Karr suggests, for the 
Roman writers say it is yellow, not white, according to 
Homer, while the old associations, which still hung about it, 
made Pliny invest it with a root at least thirty feet long. It will 
be observed he does zo record having received the promised 
specimen. 
For us Moly still lives at least in the lines of Milton and 
Tennyson, and has not yet lost the narcotic charm ascribed 
to it of old :— 
But propt on beds of amaranth and moly, 
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly), 
With half-dropped eyelid still 
Beneath a Heaven dark and holy, 
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly 
His waters from the purple hill. 
The next Homeric plant is the Lotus. 
Odysseus and his crew arrive at the land of the Lotus 
Eaters, who eat of that flowery food : 
‘And whoso ate of the Lotus, honey-sweet, straightway was 
he minded to return no more, but there were ther fain to abide 
with the Lotus Eaters, culling the Lotus evermore, heedless of all 
return.” 
This Lotus is in all probability the modern Jujube, the 
Zizyphus Jujuba, with a small date-like fruit, which sweetens 
with preservation—still growing freely on the ancient site, on 
the coast of the Syrtis, and the island Meninx or Lotophagitis. 
Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny describe it in very 
much the same terms, and speak of the sweetness of the wine 
made from the fruit. 
It is, of course, quite different from the Egyptian Lotus— 
the Nile lily, which is almost certainly the Nymphaea Stellata, 
or perhaps the Neluwmbium Speciosum, with the large um- 
brella-like leaf and flowers, somewhat like those of our common 
water lily, the seeds of which were also prepared and used 
as food, as was poppy seed by the ancients. It is the Nymphaea 
