38 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



spring out of the tree into which it has been driven. Again, 

 Vitruvius, speaking of the virtues of Spleenwort (Ceterach Officm- 

 arum) as regards its reputed action on the spleen, says that in the 

 island of Crete, on the side toward Cortyna, the flocks and herds 

 were found without spleens because they browsed on this herb, while 

 on the other side, toward Gnosus, they had spleens because it did 

 not grow there. Such superstitions continued through the days of 

 the Roman Empire, were very prevalent during the middle ages, and 

 remnants of them still exist, especially in country districts. How 

 fixed was the belief in the magical properties of certain plants, may 

 be judged from the following lines by Virgil, written, not in a strain 

 of poetic, fervid imagination, but of sober earnest : 



"These poisonous plants, for magic use designed, 

 (The noblest and the best of all the baneful kind) 

 Old Mffiris brought me from the Pontic strand, 

 And culled the mischief of a bounteous land. 

 Smeared with their powerful juices, on the plain 

 He howls, a wolf among the hungry train : 

 And oft the mighty necromancer boasts 

 With them, to call from tombs the stalking ghosts." 



Later, we find Culpeper, in his herbal published in 1653, saying 

 of Moonwort (Botrychiuvi Lunaria) : " Moonwort is an herb which 

 will open locks, and unshoe such horses as tread upon it, and country 

 people that I know call it ' Unshoe the Horse.' Besides I have 

 heard commanders say, that on White Down in Devonshire, near 

 Tiverton, there was found thirty horse-shoes pulled off trom the feet 

 of the Earl of Essex his horses being there drawn up in a body, 

 many of them being but newly shod, and no reason known." 

 Numberless further examples of the superstitious belief in the magic 

 power of plants might be cited, but I must pass on to the history 

 of botany proper. This, for convenience of description, I shall 

 divide into four great epochs, calling them the Ancient, the Arabian, 

 the Artificial, and the Natural Epochs. 



The Ancient Epoch embraces the period between the creation 

 of the world and the destruction of the Western Empire by the Goths 

 and Vandals, which races, cradled in war and rapine, hated science, 

 believing it caused effeminacy in its devotees, and would not allow 

 their children to cultivate it. The earliest known mention of plants 

 is in the Book of Genesi^, where it is recorded by Moses that, on the 



