eI PLANTS AND PLANETS. 161 
Garden Bazil “is the herb which all authors are 
together by the ears about, and rail at one another 
(like lawyers). Galen and Dioscorides hold it not 
fitting to be taken inwardly; and Chrysippus rails at 
it with downright Billingsgate rhetoric; Pliny and 
the Arabian physicians defend it.” “ Mizaldus affirms 
that, being laid to rot in horse-dung, it will breed 
venomous beasts. Hilarius, a French physician, 
affirms, upon his own knowledge, that an acquaint- 
ance of his, by common smelling to it, had a scorpion 
bred in his brain. Something is the matter, this herb 
and rue will not grow together, no, nor near one 
another; and we know rue is as great an enemy to 
poison as any that grows.” 
Bay-Tree. “It is a tree of the sun, and under the 
celestial sign Leo, and resisteth witchcraft very po- 
tently, as also all the evils old Saturn can do to the 
body of man, and they are not a few; for it is the 
speech of one, and I am mistaken if it were not 
Mizaldus, that neither witch nor devil, thunder or 
lightning, will hurt a man in the place where a Bay- 
tree is.” 
Of the Chamomile he remarks: “ Nichessor saith, 
the Egyptians dedicated it to the sun; because it 
cured agues, and they were like enough to do it, for 
they were the arrantest apes in their religion I ever 
read of,” 
The Celandine is “called Chelidonium, from the 
Greek word Chelidon, which signifies a swallow, 
because they say, that if you put out the eyes of 
young swallows when they are in the nest, the old 
ones will recover their eyes again with this herb, 
L 
