CXCIII.— SHEPHERD’S NEEDLE. 
Scandix Pecten-Veneris Linne. 
O UR ancestors, who lived in the country and passed most of their lives in the 
open air, were by no means lacking in perception. Not having technical 
botanical training, they might fail to discriminate between many nearly allied forms 
of plants that are wellnigh identical in their chief external features ; but, where a 
plant possessed any marked peculiarities of form, they were not slow to notice 
them, though it might not be a very large or conspicuous species. 
Thus Scandix Pecten-Veneris Linne, a small cornfield weed, has more than thirty 
popular names, more or less current and found in use in all parts of the country 
where the plant occurs, i.e. wherever there are cornfields. Few of these names 
are shared with other species — a proof that its distinctive peculiarity, unlike those 
of many nearly related lJmbellifer<e , was widely recognised. This is the more 
remarkable in that we do not know of the plant having been applied to any useful 
purpose. It was merely a well-known weed. It is true that cr/ccLSt^, skandix , is 
used by Theophrastus and Aristophanes for some edible plant, apparently a kind 
of Chervil ; but it is not at all clear that this was the species to which we now 
apply the name. It is remarkable that in three fifteenth-century vocabularies, 
printed by Professor Earle, Scandix is explained as Madder ; whilst Turner, in 1548, 
writing apparently of the Shepherd’s Needle, ignores all its popular names — some 
of which must almost certainly have been in use long before that period — and 
proposes an English name of his own invention. 
“ Scandix,” he says, “ groweth in Germany among the come. The greatest plentie of it that euer I sawe, was betwene 
Ron and Popelsdorp in a come fielde. It may be called in english come Cheruel. It is hote & dry in the thirde degree.” 
Sir James Edward Smith writes that the plant 
“ is sometimes a troublesome weed, to which, though slightly aromatic and acrid, no particular use is attributed.” 
The mere occurrence, however, of the name of the plant in Turner’s “Names 
of Herbes ” is, perhaps, proof that it had at some time been considered medicinal. 
The genus Scandix comprises about a dozen annual species, natives of the 
Temperate regions of the Old World. They have pinnately decompound leaves, 
divided up into minute segments ; and simple or compound umbels of white flowers, 
without bracts, but with several bracteoles which are generally cut or fringed and 
considerably longer than the very short flower-stalks. The calyx-teeth are more or 
less completely suppressed and the little spreading petals are generally unequal, the 
outermost one in the flowers at the margin of the umbels being often relatively 
quite large. There is a red-tinged, five-lobed disk, and the central flowers of the 
umbel or those forming little umbels “ of the third order ” — borne, that is, on 
pedicels rising among the flowers of the secondary umbels — may be entirely 
staminate. Stamens and stigmas may mature simultaneously, or the former may be 
