THE CENTAURY— continued. 
medical lore that he imparted to them. Fatally wounded by one of the arrows 
of Hercules — poisoned with the bile of the Lernean Hydra — Chiron was placed 
among the constellations as Sagittarius. 
This beautiful genus, named in his honour, comprises some thirty species of 
annual or perennial plants, mostly natives of the North Temperate Zone. They 
have erect, square stems and their leaves are more or less connate at the base. The 
parts of the flowers may be in fours, but are usually five in a whorl : the calyx is 
divided to its base ; and the funnel-shaped corolla may be pink, white, or yellow. 
There is no free honey in the flower ; but the corolla-tube is probably pierced by 
insects for the sweet sap in its internal tissue. Differences in the length of the style 
and in the pollen have been observed, though definite heterogony has not been 
demonstrated. The flower is homogamous, and the exserted anthers as they 
wither become spirally twisted. Except in bright morning light, the petals are 
closed over both anthers and stigmas. In the most generally distributed of the five 
British species, C. umbellatum Gilibert, described in many books under the name 
Lrythr^ea Centaurium Persoon, the flowers open between five and seven o’clock in 
the morning and begin to close about noon ; but they close if the sky becomes 
overcast and reopen five days in succession. 
In a manuscript Vocabulary of the eleventh century, quoted by Professor Earle, 
we have “ Centauria, heorth-gealla,” i.e. earth-gall. Turner, in his “ Libellus ” 
(1538), writes 
u Centaurii duo sunt genera, maius & minus. . . . Minus libadion fel terre & febrifugia dicitur, angli uocant Centory.” 
“There are two kinds of Centaurium y majus and minus. . . . Minus is called libadion y earth-gall, and feverfew. The 
English call it Centory ” 
Libadion is Pliny’s name and refers to the plant’s love of moist places ; whilst 
the other names are appropriate references to the intense bitterness of the plant, 
which, before the days of quinine, made all the members of this Family valuable as 
febrifuges and tonics. In the north of Scotland an infusion of this plant is still 
drunk medicinally under the name of Gentian. Dr. Prior even attempts to. explain 
the pretty name Christ's Ladder , which he finds in fourteenth-century catalogues, 
as arising from a mistake of Christis-galle , alluding to the bitter draught offered to 
Our Lord in the Passion, for Christi scala. In Manx, however, we find the purely 
poetical Keym Chreest , i.e. Steps of Christ for this beautiful flower that stars the 
meadows with its clustering pink blossoms. 
Gerard’s description of it is terse and graphic : — 
“The lesser Centorie,” he writes, “is a little herbe : it groweth vp with a cornered stalke, halfe a foot high, with leaues 
in form and bignesse of Saint Iohn’s woort : the flowers growe at the top in a spokie bush or rundell, of a red colour tending 
to purple, which in the day-time, and after the sunne is vp doe open themselues, and towardes euening do shut vp againe : 
after them come foorth small seede vessels, of the shape of wheate comes, in which are conteined very little seedes.” 
