OF BRITISH PLANTS. 211 



smallest shadow of reason. Mr. J. Hardy, in an excellent 

 article on the subject in the third number of the Border 

 Magazine, has shown that the plant intended by the writers 

 of Queen Elizabeth's reign was the watercress. Thus 

 Stanihurst, in Holinshed's^Chronicle, ed. 1586, says : 

 " Watercresses, which they tearme shamrocks, roots, and 

 other herbs they feed upon ; " a statement which he re- 

 peats in his work, " De rebus in Hibernia," p. 52. Fynes 

 Morison also says that "they willingly eate the herbe sham- 

 rock, being of a sharp taste, which, as they run to and 

 fro, they snatch like beasts out of the ditches." It will be 

 objected to the watercress, that its leaf is not trifoliate, and 

 could not have been used by St. Patrick to illustrate the 

 doctrine of the Trinity. But this story is of modern date, 

 and not to be found in any of the lives of that saint. In 

 Chambers' Book of Days, vol. i. p. 384, it is stated that 

 the trefoil is in Arabic called shamrakh, and held sacred 

 in Iran, as emblematical of the Persian Triads. The word 

 is shimrakh, and means a bunch of dates ! The plant 

 which is figured upon our coins, both Irish and English, is 

 a conventional trefoil. As its leaflets are stipitate, it can- 

 not have been meant for a wood-sorrel, as some writers have 

 pretended it to be. The plant that, upon the authority of 

 Dr. Moore, of Dublin, and other competent persons, has for 

 many years been recognized in Ireland as the true sham- 

 rock, is the black nonsuch, Medicago lupulina, L. 

 and occasionally mixed with it, or mistaken for it, the 

 Dutch clover, Trifolium repens, L. 



SHAREWORT, L. inguinalis, from being supposed to cure 

 diseases of the share or groin, called buboes, whence one of 

 its synonyms in old authors bubonium. The misunder- 

 standing of this word bubonium led to some ludicrous 

 theories of the effect of the plant upon toads. The Ortus 

 Sanitatis tells us (ch. 431) that it means toad-wort, for that 

 " bubo means toad. Inde bubonium. And it is so called, 



