te oi eee a Alea MEER ge Sl Need 
269 
CREDULITY, CULINARY AND CURATIVE. 
Herbal Simples | approved | for Modern uses of Cure, | By W. T. FEernig, 
ha eae Bristol : John Wright & Co., 1893. [2nd Edn., Revised and 
Amplified, 1897—Thick 8vo. Price 6s.] 
SINCE somewhat outside our scope as naturalists, the better part, 
perhaps, would beeto pass over this book in silence, and not by 
a single word retard Time in its certain revenge. For those who like 
the sort of reading it provides—gossipy folk-lore about pot-herbs and 
simples, telling the tale of hard-dying simplicity and superstition—it 
is a many-course dinner to be taken uncritically, though only by 
those who can swallow a great deal. To examine the ingredients 
severally would surely be to have one’s taste spoilt for long time ; 
and any relish felt in the examination cannot but be mingled with 
sorrow: those palates of the Past that could put up with so much 
of pitiful and strange must have approximated to the gutter-child’s 
or the infant’s of to-day, with whom, as we know, the first impulse is 
to put everything to their mouth, deleterious or dubious alike. As 
the reviewer in another place said, ‘the green end of a goose- 
dropping ’—once a nostrum for the ‘falling sickness,’ though only 
half vegetable, the other half /ozw//y-animal—seems to us in our 
enlightenment much more likely to give one a fit than cure it! 
The book has attained to the dignity of a bulkier 2nd edition, 
and is in truth a not very discriminating compilation from the older 
herbals of all sorts of plant-lore. Good intention—a downward- 
Matters of history alone, not to be taken seriously. Much of it 
seems to us to be pseudo-scientific, inexact, and loosely expressed ; 
and not one of the points that strike us as faulty in the first edition 
seem to be amended in the second. : 
On the first page, in both editions, the date of John Evelyn's 
*Acetaria—a Discourse of Sallets,’ wherein over fifty sorts are 
enumerated, is given as 1725, Whereas it was first issued in 1699, 
and again in 1706, the famous author-gardener dying in the latter 
ear. 
Slipshodisms in phrase abound, and of course do not make for 
lucidity. On p. 222, of the Poor Man’s Garlic, Erysimum alliaria, 
treated not under Cress-worts, but under Leek and Onion, we find it 
Said that it is ‘a somewhat coarse and most ordinary member of the 
Onion tribe.” It js nothing of the sort ; and the botanical sense of 
