CHAPTER VIII 



THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNATURES AND 

 ASTROLOGICAL BOTANY 



URING the preceding chapters, we 

 have restricted our discussion to those 

 writings which may be credited with 

 having taken some part, however slight, 

 in advancing the knowledge of plants. 

 We have, as it were, confined our 

 attention to the main stream of botani- 

 cal progress, and its tributaries. But 

 before concluding, it may be well to call to mind the 

 existence of more than one backwater, connected indeed 

 with the main channel, but leading nowhere. 



The subject of the superstitions, with which herb 

 collecting has been hedged about at different periods, is 

 far too wide to be dealt with in detail in the present book. 

 We have referred in earlier chapters to the observances 

 with which the Greek herb-gatherers surrounded their 

 calling (p. 7) and to the mysterious dangers which are 

 described in the 'Herbarium' of Apuleius as attending the 

 uprooting of the Mandrake (p. 36). There is com- 

 paratively little reference to such matters in the works of 

 the German Fathers of Botany or those of the greatest of 

 their successors ; indeed, as we have previously mentioned 

 (pp. 55 — 58, 103, 104), Bock's famous ' Kreuter Buch ' 

 and William Turner's herbal contain definite refutations 

 of various superstitions. 



Contemporaneously, however, with the fine series of 

 herbals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there 

 appeared a succession of books about plants, which had as 



