INTRODUCTION. XX111 



reputation. He lias been described to me by a physician 

 who knew him well, the late Dr. Sainsbury, sen., of 

 Corsham, as a very unpretending man, and a successful 

 practitioner, and visited and consulted from all parts of 

 the county. He had been brought up very humbly, and 

 lived and dressed as a poor man in a cottage by the road- 

 side, where he was born, and where his father and grand- 

 father had lived before him, and been famous in their day 

 as bonesetters. There, if the weather permitted, he would 

 bring out his chair and table, and seat his numerous 

 patients on the hedgebank, and prescribe for them out of 

 doors. It is said that, being well acquainted with every 

 part of the county, he would usually add to the names of 

 the plants that he ordered, the localities near the home of 

 his visitor where they would most readily be found. 



There were probably up to the end of the last century 

 many such persons in other parts of England, combining 

 the trades of herbarist and apothecary, and humbly 

 supplying the place of those "gentlewomen" for whom 

 Gerarde wrote his Herbal, and of the kind and charitable 

 nuns of an earlier time. They were people of very humble 

 or no education, and we might be tempted to suppose that 

 we owe the absurd names we find in the following cata- 

 logue to their ignorance and credulity. This is not at all 

 the case. People in that rank of life seldom or never 

 originate anj^thing. Popular plant names, quite as much 

 as popular tales, superstitions, ballads, and remedies, arise 

 with a higher and more educated class of society, and 



