OF HERBS IN MEDICINE 163 



doctors to herbs is often supposed to be a modern 

 development, but hear Culpepper in 1652 ! " Drones lie 

 at home and eat up what the bees have taken pains for. 

 Just so do the college of physicians lie at home and 

 domineer and suck out the sweetness of other men's 

 labours and studies, themselves being as ignorant in the 

 matter of herbs as a child of four years old, as I can make 

 appear to any rational man by their last dispensatory." 



It was not unnatural that the Herbalists should maintain 

 the superiority of vegetable over mineral drugs, and Ger- 

 arde expresses his opinions in the introduction to his 

 "Herbal." "I confesse blind Pluto is nowadays more 

 sought after than quick-sighted Phoebus, and yet this 

 dusty metall, ... is rather snatched of man to his own 

 destruction. . . . Contrariwise, in the expert knowledge 

 of herbes what pleasure still renewed with varietie ? 

 What small expence ? What security ? And yet what 

 an apt and ordinary meanes to conduct men to that most 

 desired benefit of health ? " 



Many herbs have been expunged from modern Phar- 

 macopoeias. Perhaps we have no use for them now that 

 we, in England, no longer live in perpetual terror of the 

 bitings of sea-hares, scorpions or tarantulas, as our 

 forefathers seem to have done ! In Harrison's " Descrip- 

 tion of England," the habit of preferring foreign, to 

 native herbs, is rebuked. " But herein (the cherishing 

 of foreign herbs) I find some cause of just complaint, for 

 that we extoll their uses so farre that we fall into 

 contempt of our owne, which are, in truth, more bene- 

 ficiall and apt for us than such as grow elsewhere, sith 

 (as I said before) everie region hath abundantly within 

 his own limits whatsoever is needfull and most con- 

 venient for them that dwell therein." Probably there 

 are to-day some thinkers of this stamp, as well as others 

 who will hold anything valuable as long as it has been 

 fetched from " overseas." 



