38 ASTER HIstTory 
up in actual fact as a mere romancer’s sophistication of the flower’s 
name. 
Shining in the Night——The stars of this plant shine in the — 
night ; so that those who do not understand, when they see this, 
suppose it to be an apparition (¢dvtaapa), but it is discovered and 
is understood by the shepherds of the flocks.—D. (Interpolation, 
fide Marcellus Vergilius, followed by Sprengel: and see supra, 
P- 37). 
This herb Asterion shines in the night just like a star in the 
sky, and anyone who sees it unaware of this fact may say that he 
sees a phantasm, and being full of fear he is laughed at, most of 
all bythe shepherds. “ Haec herba nocte tanquam stella in coelo 
lucet, et qui videt ignorans dicat phantasma se videre, et metu 
plenus irridetur, maxime a pastoribus.”’ A [puleius Platonicus, quoted, 
with a parsimony of miracle, omitting “et metu plenus irridetur,” 
by the Ortus Sanitatis and credited by mistake to Pliny ; and in 
the Gart der Gesundheit quoted with the variation that “it shines 
so bright that men weened it is a spectre (Gespenst) or a devil” 
(edn. 1485). 
Hujus stellae noctibus collucent; quare qui naturam stirpis 
ignorant, inane simulacrum se videre putant. Ruel, De Natura, 
1536; Matthiol, 1554, 1560, etc. 
Dorstenius, 1540, quotes this, p. 157, calling the spectre 
“ phantasma,”’ adding that “ Vergilius Marcellus confutes and re- 
jects this, as something superstitious, because in the most ancient 
Greek and Latin authors it is not found,” 7. ¢., not found in Galen 
nor in Pliny, 
The spectre reappears as “una phantasma”’ in Matthioli’s Italian 
edition of 1568 ; and in the form “the flowers shine in the night — 
till they frighten men, who think they see the devil,’ in Adam _ 
Lonitzer’s Kreuterbuch, 1 et. 
Fables ascribing this power of shining in the night to other — 
plants were not unknown to the ancient world. Pliny, bk. 21, c. 36, 
cites the Greek herbalist Democritus as narrating the night-shining 
properties of a plant of Gedrosia (in ancient Persia), which he 
names Nyctegreton, the night-watcher, a plant ceremonially em- 
ployed by the Magi and the Parthian kings ; and others, he says, 
called it Nyctalops, “from the light which it emits at a consider- 
able distance by night.” 
