THE TUBEROUS PEA. 75 



in his " History of the Gallic War," and is probably the same 

 as that referred to by another Roman historian as furnishing, 

 when mixed with milk, a sufficient sustenance for a time, 

 when the army of Valerius outran their commissariat 

 department. The Scottish mountaineers grind these tubers 

 into a kind of flour for bread-making purposes in time of 

 dearth, and prepare an intoxicating drink from them ; they 

 also believe that they are efficacious for lung affections. 

 This lowly plant is, therefore, at once meat, drink, and 

 medicine, though it is doiibtful whether it fulfils any of 

 these functions very satisfactorily : in the same way that 

 when we buy a penknife that is also a measure, a file, a cork- 

 screw, a punch, and has some few other uses, we discern that 

 its efficiency in any one of these modifications is, after all, 

 not great, and that, on the whole, we should have done better 

 to have got any one of these things unencumbered with the 

 rest. A weapon that aspires to be at once bayonet and 

 saw, a tool that professes to be at once axe and hammer, 

 ends in being neither in any efficient degree. 



The generic name of the wood pea, Orolus, is uncertain 

 in its significance, but it has been suggested that it is derived 

 from two Greek words signifying an ox and to strengthen, 

 on account of its yielding food to cattle. Whether it ever 

 does to any appreciable extent furnish provender to cattle 

 is a very doubtful point, as the situations in which it 

 thrives best are scarcely those in which we can expect to find 

 stock at all. It is, at all events, no more a strengthener of 

 the ox, we should think, than some fifty other plants that 

 receive an occasional bite as they spring up by the hedge- 

 row or skirt the copse. The foliage of this plant is a good 

 deal eaten by some grub or insect of a species unknown to 

 us, so that it is very difficult to find a piece uumutilated. 



