LXXXIX.— THE COMMON FUMITORY. 
Fumaria officinalis Linne. 
I T is, I fear, true that there is but little poetry or imagination in our English 
popular names for plants. What imagination they do evince is rather as to the 
curative virtues of the plants. This absence of poetic imagination, however, is not 
true of those South European peoples to whom we owe the earlier forms of some 
of these names, though it seems as if the Roman Pliny often goes out of his way 
to find a prosaic utilitarian explanation of Greek poetry. Thus an old Greek 
name Kanviov, kapnion^ from Kairuos, kapnos, smoke, given from the smoke-like 
appearance of the plant as it rises a little way from the ground, and preserved to us 
in essence in the French Fumeterre and our older spelling Fumiterrie, becomes in 
Pliny Fumaria “because the juice thereof if put into the eyes produces weeping as 
does smoke.” 
It is remarkable how much more attention this genus Fumaria has attracted in 
popular nomenclature and in popular medicine than the allied Corydalis, mainly, 
perhaps, because the Fumitories are common cornfield weeds. Our commonest 
species well earned Linne’s specific name officinalis^ since, though it no longer appears 
in our pharmacopoeias, it was so long considered officinal that it has been well said 
that a volume might be written on the medical virtues ascribed to it by physicians 
from Dioscorides to Cullen. With a clear, watery juice, slightly bitter and slightly 
acid, it was first belauded as a tonic and then fell down to the level of a cosmetic. 
An interesting fourteenth-century manuscript, preserved at Stockholm and ascribed 
to John of Milan, runs — 
** Furmiter is erbe, I say, 
Yt springyth in April et in May, 
In feld, in town, in yard, et gate, 
Where lond is fat and good in state. 
Dun red is his flour, 
Ye erbe smoke lik in colowur, 
Ageyn feuerys cotidian, 
And ageyn feuerys tertyen. 
And ageyn feuerys quarteyn 
It is medicyn souereyn." 
On the other hand, the rustic John Clare in the nineteenth century can only speak 
of it as a plant — 
“Whose red ami purple-mottled flowers 
Are cropped by maids in weeding hours. 
To boil in water, milk, and whey 
For w'ashes on a holiday. 
To make their beauty fair and sleek 
And scare the tan from summer’s cheek.” 
It has been remarked that the decided predilection of the plant for rich cultivated 
land which the fourteenth-century writer noticed was equally recognised by 
Shakespeare, who mentions “ rank Fumitory ” among the weeds that feed upon the 
fallow leas of France left desolate by war. We may well believe that this group, 
like the Poppies, has spread from a southern home with seed corn. 
