XX. pPant "bore, Tsegel^^/, anil Tsync/*, 



sunrise, is deemed a prote<5lion against thunderstorms. This last 

 plant is especially hateful to evil spirits, and in days gone by 

 was called Fuga damonum, dispeller of demons. In Russia, a plant, 

 called the Certagon, or Devil-chaser, is used to exorcise Satan or 

 his fiends if they torment an afflicted mourner; and in the same 

 country the Prikrit is a herb whose peculiar province it is to 

 destroy calumnies with which mischief-makers may seek to inter- 

 fere with the consummation of lovers' bliss. Other plants induce 

 concord, love, and sympathy, and others again enable the owner 

 to forget sorrow. 



Plants connecfled with dreams and visions have not hitherta 

 received much notice; but, nevertheless, popular belief has attri- 

 buted to some few — and notably the Elm, the Four-leaved 

 Clover, and the Russian Son-trava — the subtle power of procuring 

 dreams of a prophetic nature. Numerous plants have been 

 thought by the superstitious to portend certain results to the 

 sleeper when forming the subjecft of his or her dreams. Many 

 examples of this belief will be found scattered through these pages. 



The legends attached to flowers may be divided into four 

 classes — the mythological, the ecclesiastical, the historical, and the 

 poetical. For the first-named we are chiefly indebted to Ovid, and 

 to the Jesuit Rene Rapin, whose Latin poem De Hortonim Cultma 

 contains much curious plant lore current in his time. His legends, 

 like those of Ovid, nearly all relate to the transformation by the 

 gods of luckless nymphs and youths into flowers and trees, which 

 have since borne their names. Most of them refer to the blossoms of 

 bulbous plants, which appear in the early Spring ; and, as a rule, 

 white flowers are represented as having originated from tears, and 

 pink or red flowers from blushes or blood. The ecclesiastical 

 legends are principally due to the old Catholic monks, who, while 

 tending their flowers in the quietude and seclusion of monastery gar- 

 dens, doubtless came to associate them with the memory of some 

 favourite saint or martyr, and so allowed their gentle fancy to 

 weave a pious ficftion wherewith to perpetuate the memory of the 

 saint in the name of the flower. For many of the historical le- 

 gends we are also indebted to monastic writers, and they mostly 

 pertain to favourite sons and daughters of the Church. Amongst 



