Tsuna? (^affueace or^ pFant^. 171 



plants with special ref,'ard to the phases of the Moon ; and Rapin, 

 in his poem on Gardens, has the following lines: — 



" If you with flow'rs would stock the pregnant earth, 

 Mark well the Moon propitious to their birth : 

 For earth tlie silent niichiight queen obeys, 

 And waits her course, who, clad in silver rays, 

 Th" eternal round of times and seasons guides, 

 Controls the air, and o'er the winds presides. 

 Four days expir'd you have your time to sow. 

 Till to the full th' increasing Moon shall grow; 

 This past, your labour you in vain bestow : 

 Nor' let the gard'ner dare to plant a f]ow'r 

 While on his work the heav'ns ill-boding low'r ; 

 When Moons forbid, forbidding Moons obey. 

 And hasten when the Stars inviting beams display." 



John Evelyn, in his ' Sylva, or a Discourse on Forest Trees,' 

 first published in 1662, remarks on the attention paid by woodmen 

 to the Moon's influence on trees. He says: " Then for the age of 

 the Moon, it has religiously been observed; and that Diana's 

 presidency in sylvis was not so much celebrated to credit the 

 fidtions of the poets, as for the dominion of that moist planet and 

 her influence over timber. For my part, I am not so much inclined 

 to these criticisms, that I should altogether govern a felling at the 

 pleasure of this mutable huly; however, there is doubtless some 

 regard to be had — 



' Nor is't in vain signs' fall and rise to note.' 



The old rules are these: Fell in the decrease, or four days 

 after the conjunction of the two great luminaries; sowe the last 

 quarter of it; or (as Pliny) in the very article of the change, if 

 possible; w^hich hapning (saith he) in the last day of the Winter 

 solstice, that timber will prove immortal. At least should it be 

 from the twentieth to the thirtieth day, according to Columella; 

 Cato, four days after the full, as far better for the growth; nay, 

 Oak in the Summer: but all vimineous trees, silente bind, such as 

 Sallows, Birch, Poplar, &c. Vegetius, for ship timber, from the 

 fifteenth to the twenty-fifth, the Moon as before." In his ' French 

 Gardener,' a translation from the French, Evelyn makes a few 

 allusions to the Moon's influence on gardening and grafting 

 operations, and in his Kalendarium Hortense we find him acknow- 

 ledging its supremacy more than once ; but he had doubtless 

 begun to lose faith in the scrupulous direcftions bequeathed by the 

 Romans. In his introduction to the ' Kalendar ' he says: — "We 

 are yet far from imposing (by any thing we have here alledged 

 concerning these menstrual periods) those nice and hypercritical 

 punctilios which some astrologers, and such as pursue these rules, 

 seem to oblige our gard'ners to; as if forsooth all were lost, and 

 our pains to no purpose, unless the sowing and the planting, the 

 cutting and the pruning, were performed in such and such an e.xacl 

 minute of the Moon : In hac autem niris disciplina non desideratur 



