244 O n the Campus 



credulity of the ignorant, and much of it persists now 

 under the same conditions. There are people in Iowa 

 who prefer to medicate themselves and their children 

 with decoctions framed in the name of some wild ' ' medi- 

 cine man, ' ' rather than trust to the wisdom and science 

 of their enlightened neighbors, the physicians. Look at 

 the shelves of your shops, Indian remedies, Cherokee 

 medicines, St. Jacob's oil, and tell me if we have jour- 

 neyed far along the corridors of time. Science has great 

 difficulty in discarding these old traditions. Year by 

 year the plant list in the pharmacopeia is reduced. I 

 have, perhaps, in my herbarium three hundred or four 

 hundred medicinal plants; I believe that of these at 

 least ninety-five per cent have no possible therapeutic 

 value. 



But there is still another phase of plant-lore that 

 seems ineradicable among us. I refer to that which re- 

 lates the prosperity of vegetables to the influence of the 

 moon and the stars, particularly the moon, as that lum- 

 inary is evidently so much larger. I suppose there are 

 men in this city to-day who in all their gardening ob- 

 serve the changes of the moon. Tylor says that "in 

 days gone by, neither sowing, planting, nor grafting was 

 ever undertaken without scrupulous attention to the wax- 

 ing or waning of the moon." 



"Sow peas and beans in the wane of the moon; 

 Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soon, 

 That they with the planet may rest and rise 

 And flourish in bearing most plentiful-wise." 



In our boyhood days potatoes planted in the dark of 



