TURQUOISE. | NATURAL HISTORY. 319 
groweth by Hackney, and those that are brought to Cheap- 
side Market from that village are the best that ever I 
tasted. Turnips flower and seed the second year after they 
are sown; for those which flower the same year that they 
are sown are a degenerate kind, called in Cheshire about 
the Namptwitch [i.e., Nantwich] Mad Neeps—of their evil 
quality in causing frenzy and giddiness of the brain for a 
season. The root is many times eaten raw, especially of 
the poor people in Wales, but most commonly boiled or 
roasted or baked; the young and tender shoots or springs 
of turnips at their first coming forth of the ground boiled 
and eaten as a salad. Crrurd’s © Webal® oe. 
WirH us the yellow, which comes from Denmark, is 
preferred ; by others, the red Bohemian, The stalks of the 
common Turnip, when first beginning to bud, being boiled, 
eat like asparagus. Evelyn, “ Acetaria,” § 79. 
Tue best husbandmen would have the seedsmen [of 
Turnips or rapes] to be naked when he sows them, and in 
sowing to protest, that this which he doth is for himself 
and his neighbours. Mark how many days old the moon 
was when the first snow fell the winter next before,—for 
if a man do sow rapes or Turnips within the foresaid com- 
pass of that time, the moon being so many days old, they 
will come to be wondrous great, and increase exceedingly. 
Holland’s Pliny, bk. xviii. ch. xiii, 
Tue Turnip or navew groweth sometimes to thirty or 
forty pound weight. The best way of use is accounted, 
first to boil them, and, the water being poured out, then to 
boil them again with fat beef, adding to them some pepper. 
Hart, “Diet of the Diseased,” bk. i, ch. xiii. 
Turquoise. 
Mercuanr oF Venice, iii, 1, 126. 
Turquoise is a white yellow stone, and hath that name 
of the country of Turkey, there it is bred. This stone 
keepeth and saveth the sight, and breedeth gladness and 
comfort. Bartholomew (Berthelet), bk. xvi. § 97. 
