INTRODUCTION. XV 



the case of the Forget-me-not, were suggestive of very 

 disagreeable qualities. In many cases, as in that of the 

 hawkweed, the miltwaste, and the celandine, they refer 

 to virtues that were ascribed to the plants from the 

 use that birds and other animals were supposed to make 

 of them. Many more have been given to them in 

 accordance with the so-called doctrine of signatures. This 

 was a system for discovering the medicinal uses of a 

 plant from something in its external appearance that 

 resembled the disease it would cure, and proceeded 

 upon the belief that God had in this manner indicated 

 its especial virtues. Thus the hard stony seeds of the 

 Gromwell must be good for gravel, and the knotty tubers 

 of scrophularia for scrofulous glands ; while the scaly 

 pappus of Scabiosa showed it to be a specific in leprous 

 diseases, the spotted leaves of Pulmonaria, that it was a 

 sovereign remedy for tuberculous lungs, and the growth of 

 Saxifrage in the fissures of rocks, that it would disinte- 

 grate stone in the bladder. For, as "Wm. Coles tells us in 

 his Art of Simpling, ch. xxvii : " Though Sin and Sathan 

 have plunged mankinde into an Ocean of Infirmities, yet 

 the mercy of God which is over all his workes, maketh 

 Grasse to grow upon the Mountaines, and Herbes for the 

 use of men, and hath not only stamped upon them a dis- 

 tinct forme, but also given them particular Signatures, 

 whereby a man may read, even in legible characters, the 

 use of them." 



Other names we shall find relate to the economical uses 



