28 REVIEWS, . [January, 



need not marvel at this. Two centuries ago naturalists believed 

 that geese grew on trees in the Hebridean isles of Caledonia ; and 

 a learned Professor of the present day believes in the lying legends 

 of Boece and Buchanan, and he has repeatedly avowed his belief 

 in the fabulous account of an army of Danes being poisoned by 

 the juice of a plant which hardly grows in Scotland, and quotes 

 the relation as a proof of the extensive knowledge of plants 

 possessed by the Scots in the mythic times of Macbeth. 



That Pliny should deal largely in the marvellous is no subject 

 of wonderment, when the editor of the * Gardeners' Chronicle ' 

 treats his readers with large refreshments of the same kind, culled 

 from the ancient Scots chronicles. The former however either 

 quotes his authority, or retails the wonders as on clits or man 

 sprichts (hear-says). He does not give implicit credit to every 

 account, like some of the learned of modem times. Pliny ap- 

 pears, from some of his remarks, not to have had much confi- 

 dence in the curative remedies of the professors of the healing 

 art, and thus in a quiet way satirizes the puffing of the ancients. 

 " Compositions," he says, " and mixtures of an inexplicable na- 

 ture, forthwith have their praises sung, and the productions of 

 Arabia and India are held in unbounded admiration in the very 

 midst of us. For some trifling sore or other a medicament is 

 prescribed from the shores of the Red Sea, while not a day passes 

 but what the real remedies are to be found upon the tables of the 

 very poorest man among us. But if the remedies for diseases 

 were derived from our own gardens, if the plants or shrubs were 

 employed which grow there, there would be no art, forsooth, that 

 would rank lower than that of medicine." 



There were puffs and puffers then, who held a higher rank in 

 the medicinal line than Cockle, Holloway, and the other paten- 

 tees, proprietors, or vendors of medicinal nostrums of the present 

 day. For all such, Pliny's work is a valuable store. Endless 

 recipes for pills, draughts, gargles, ointments, cerates and salves, 

 liniments, detersives, astringents, anodynes, antidotes, etc. etc., 

 may be culled from its numerous pages. 



One of the most common and useful properties of many plants 

 is their remedial agency in curing the fatal or painful conse- 

 quences of the bites or stings of serpents. Hence it is inferred 

 that venomous reptiles abounded in the south of Europe in Pliny's 

 time. They are still numerous in those regions. Many of the 



