1859.] CHAPTERS ON BRITISH BOTANY. 165 



Or- 



"Why should mau dye (so doth the sentence [proverb] say), 

 Wlien sage grows in his garden day by day ?" 



In Palestine there grow several kinds of Sage, and among 

 them one of our two British species was seen by Hasselquist, 

 Salvia verhenaca. Rosmarinus officinalis is another plant of the 

 Flora Palestina. 



Saffron, once as celebrated in the healing art as Sage is now in 

 the culinary, is also a plant of Palestine. It is always enumerated 

 among our indigenous species, but on very unsatisfactory grounds. 

 The same may be said about our ornamental bulbous plants. 

 They are indeed common enough as productions of our gardens, 

 but they are rarely found far from places where cultivation has 

 been at some time or other employed on the soil. 



The Lily of the field, the common White Lily of our gardens, 

 is plentiful throughout Syria and Palestine, and there is no good 

 reason why our critics and commentators should cudgel their 

 brains about this and puzzle their readers with multitudes of 

 other plants which might have been alluded to by our Lord. The 

 Martagon, the Tiger, and the Orange Lilies would suit the sense 

 very well, but the grand White Lily, the emblem of dignity and 

 purity both, is every way preferable, because more common. 



It is true that this is not a British plant. Is it a European 

 species ? Perhaps not. Yet there are few British or European 

 plants better known. It may be inferred that it is as much no- 

 ticed and as general a favourite in Asia, its native land, as it is in 

 Europe. If so, it was quite as suitable for illustrating the Sermon 

 on the Mount as any other plant could be. The lesson is more 

 easily apprehended by us because we know the illustration. 



The Dove^s-dung plant, sold to the besieged inhabitants of Sa- 

 maria, .has been a fruitful source of learned trifling. Its botani- 

 cal name, which is a genuine original, and not a botanical puzzle, 

 as some think, implies a relationship to ornithology, but in a less 

 offensive form than that which our translators have affixed to it. 

 W^hat would squeamish translators think of the common name 

 of Asafmtida, viz. Teufels-dreck or Diaboli stercus, or, in plain 

 English, Devil' s-dung ? There is reason in the name, and those 

 who gave names to objects in days neither sophisticated nor silly 

 were not so fastidious as their posterity. The excrement of pi- 

 eons is speckled like the leaves of this plant {Ornithogalum) . 



