: FERNS OP GREAT BRITAIN. 121 



" And I ha' been plucking plants among 

 Hemlock, henbane, adder's tongue; 

 Nightshade, moonwort, Ibbard's-bane, 

 And twice by the dogs was like to be ta'en." 



Many of our oldest writers on plants had most firm 

 assurance of strange powers possessed by this fern : 

 thus Coles remarks — " It is said, yea, and believed by 

 many, that Moonwort will open the locks wherewith dwell- 

 ing-houses are made fast, if it be put into the keyhole ; 

 as, also, that it will ^loosen the locks, fetters, and shoes 

 from those horses' feet that goe on the places where it 

 groweth ; and of this opinion was Master Culpeper, who, 

 though he railed against superstition in others, yet had 

 enough of it himselfe, as may appear by his story of the 

 Earl of Essex his horses, which being drawne up in 

 a body, many of them lost then' shoes upon White 

 Down in Devonshire, neer Tiverton, because Moonwort 

 grows upon the heaths." Withers, writing in 1622, 

 says — 



" There is an herb, some say, whose vertue's such 

 It in the pasture, only with a touch. 

 Unshoes the new-shod steed." 



There were herbahsts, however, even in those credu- 

 lous times, who denounced this belief; as did Turner, 

 who published his "British Physician" in 1687, and 

 who says, that the plant is neither smith, farrier, nor 

 picklock ; yet even he prizes the fern for its medicinal 

 virtues, and declares himself confident that it is the 

 Moon's herb. Gerarde mentions the use of this fern by 

 the alchemists, who, he says, called it Martagon, It 

 appears to have entered into some of those compositions 

 over which so many men spent their nights and days in 



B 



