28;2 



SCALY BPLEENWORT. 



moreover, other virtues, as they were called, in addition to its 

 medicinal ones : some of these are enumerated by Gerarde, but 

 they appear so very like vices, that I decline transferring them 

 to these pages. Gerarde himself, after dwelling on one of them 

 with great apparent zest, adds : — " But this is to be reckoned 

 among the old wives' fables, and that also which Dioscorides 

 tells of, touching the gathering of spleenwort in the night, and 

 other most vain things which are found here and there scat- 

 tered in old books : from which most of the later writers do 

 not abstaine, who many times fill up their pages with lies and 

 frivolous toyes, and by so doing do not a little deceive yong 

 students." — Ger. Em. 1141. Vitruvius makes a curious asser- 

 tion respecting this fern : he relates that in Crete there is a 

 river which runs between the cities of Gnosus and Cortyna ; 

 and that on the side of Cortyna, where Ceterach grows in great 

 abundance, the swine are found to have no spleen ; but on the 

 side of Gnosus, where there is no Ceterach, the pigs rejoice 

 in spleens. Hence the name of spleenwort, or Asplenon, given 

 to this plant, from the Greek a, privative, and aTrMv, the spleen. 



