THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 



physician's witness for " if you have a little dog and wish to 

 keep it small you may give it daisies stamped with new butter 

 unsalted : " and we learn that " daisies do mitigate all kinde of 

 paines, but especially of the joints, and goute," if they are mixed 

 in the same way with unsalted butter. 



" Snapdragon," says Gerarde, " according to Discorides, is the 

 herbe that, being hanged about one, preserveth a man from being 

 bewitched, and that maketh a man gratious in the sight of the 

 people." Faith can remove mountains : and if such nostrums did 

 no good, they very often did no harm. 



The character of the herbal literature did not greatly change 

 during the next half -century, and more. In 1664 a certain Robert 

 Turner, calling himself " Botanologia Studiosus," published the 

 ' British Physician," with a title even more detailed and verbose 

 than his namesake's and predecessor's ; it set forth " the nature 

 and vertues of English plants, exactly describing such plants as 

 grow naturally in the land with their several names, Greek, Latin, 

 and English, natures, places where they flourish and are most 

 proper to be gathered ; their degree of temperature, applications 

 and vertues, physical and astrological uses, treated of ; each plant 

 appropriated to the several diseases they cure and directions for 

 their medicinal use, throughout the whole body of man ; being 

 most special helps for sudden accidents, acute and chronick dis- 

 temper. By means of which people may gather their own physick 

 under every hedge, or in their own gardens, which may be most 

 conducing to their health ; so that observing the directions in 

 this book, they may become their own physicians, for what climate 

 soever is subject to any particular disease, in the same place there 

 grows a cure." 



The punctuation of Turner's long title is so erratic that, on 

 reading it, one is, as it were, breathless before reaching the 

 end. 



Ten years after this work appeared one William Langham 

 brought out a herbal with a pretty name, " The Garden of Health," 

 but it was apparently of the same nature as " The British Phy- 

 sician," and proves that though Evelyn's various works on horti- 

 culture and notably his " Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees " 

 had awakened in some quarters an intelligent interest in horti- 

 culture and kindred sciences, the ordinary herbalist of the 



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