The Botany of Shakespeare 219 



Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns an- 

 swered his purpose without seed just as well as with such 

 visible means of perpetuity. His only reference is in the 

 lines where Gadshill says: 



"We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible"; 

 and Chamberlain replies: 



' ' Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the 

 Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible/ 



I Henry IV, ii: i, 95. 



In this connection Canon Ellacombe suggests the doc- 

 trine of signatures. The God of Nature had written for 

 us his human children prescriptions all over the leafy 

 world. The remedy indicated by its form its own ap- 

 plication. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine 

 for cardiac troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for con- 

 sumption, a lungwort in fact, and so a liverwort, a spleen- 

 wort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in fact, all the old 

 medical writers throughout the centuries, are full of this. 

 Now, what more natural than that a plant which could 

 thus perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible 

 should be able to confer the much-sought gift of invisi- 

 bility, the power to disappear and reappear at pleasure ? 

 Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears to have 

 been skeptical. 



Turn we now to the flowering plants; the amount of 

 material at our disposal, as already indicated, is im- 

 mense. Shakespeare was evidently a great lover of flow- 

 ers simply as such. His pages from first to last are or- 

 nate with color, almost redolent of roses, lilies, eglantine, 



