142 ENGLISH BOTANY. 
And again, in “ King Lear,” Cordelia says, — 
“ Alack! ’tis he ; why, he was met even now, 
As mad as the vex’d sea,—singing aloud, 
Crown’d with rank fwmiter and furrow-weeds, 
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, 
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow 
Tn our sustaining corn.” 
The expressed juice of this plant was at one time a favourite remedy with 
herbalists for skin diseases, and had a reputation as an anti-scorbutic. Mr. T. J. 
Pettigrew has secured an old medical manuscript from the Royal Library at Stockholm, 
which is traced back to the fourteenth century, and is supposed to be a poetical “system 
of health,” composed by the celebrated physician John of Milan, in which is an account 
of the manifold virtues of the Fumitory ; commencing thus :— 
“ Furmater is erbe, I say, 
Yt springyth i April et in May, 
In feld, in town, in yard, et gate, 
Where lond is fat and good in state. 
Dun red is his flour, 
Ye erbe smoke lik in colowur, 
Ageyn feuerys cotidian, 
And ageyn feurys tertyen, 
And ageyn feurys quarteyn 
Tt is medicyn souereyn.” 
Burton, in his “ Anatomy of Melancholy,” speaks of it as a plant not “to be 
omitted by those who are misaffected with melancholy, because it will much help and 
ease the spleen.” Sir John Hill, in his Herbal, recommends the leaves of the Fumitory 
to be smoked, as a remedy “for disorders of the head ;” and in more modern days 
Dr. Cullen, who paid great attention to the qualities of our native plants, recommended 
it to be used in diseases of the liver, and says “its remarkable virtues, however, are 
those of clearing the skin of many disorders.” Since his day the use of the Fumitory in 
medicine has been generally abandoned, lingering only among the “ simples” of the 
herbalist in this country, and in the Japanese Pharmacopeeia, if there be one. Clare, 
one of our old pastoral poets, alludes to its use as a cosmetic thus :— 
“And Furmitory too, a name 
Which Superstition holds to Fame, 
Whose red and purple-mottled flowers 
Are cropped by maids in weeding hours, 
To boil in water, milk, and whey 
For washes on a holiday, 
To make their beauty fair and sleek, 
And scare the tan from summet’s cheek ; 
And oft the dame will feel inclined, 
As childhood’s memory comes to mind, 
To turn her hook away, and spare 
The blooms it loved to gather there.” 
Since that time other and perhaps more injurious applications have taken the 
place of this herb in the mysteries of the toilet, for we can scarcely believe that the 
