CXXXVIIL— THE REST-HARROW. 
Ononis repens Linne. 
T here is much less waste land in England than there was in former times. 
Even though the low price of corn has led to the conversion of much arable 
land into what is termed “ permanent pasture,” the ridge and furrow often still 
visible in the turf tell of a time when this ground was under the plough. The 
proportion of our area which has at no period been under cultivation is, in fact, but 
small. Plants, such as the Rest-harrow, which have strongly developed root-systems 
or underground stems, calculated to render them a serious obstacle to the cultivator, 
may, it is true, have occasionally regained a hold upon our fields through the 
farmer’s neglect ; but they are very generally confined to the roadside waste, the 
untended but much grazed common, or the sandy links by the sea marge. 
The characteristic of the Rest-harrow which most impressed the early English 
agriculturist was not its beautiful pink blossom, nor its sweet liquorice-like root and 
pungent smell, but the long, tough, branching suckers which give to Ononis repens 
Linn6 so strong a hold upon the ground. This is probably the origin of the Old 
English name Cammock, from cam meaning “ crooked,” as when in William Langley’s 
“ Book of Piers the Plowman,” we find 
“ Communlikc in contrecs Cammoke and weedes 
Foulen the fruyt in the feld ther thei growen togideres." 
Theophrastus’s name 6voivi<;, ononis, refers probably, it is true, to the plant 
being eaten by the ass (from ovo?, onos, an ass), or growing in such waste ground as 
that in which the ass is pastured ; but the more general names, as Turner says, “of 
the herbaries ” were Resta bovis and Remora aratri, “the stoppage of the ox” and “the 
hinderer of the plough.” These reminders of the now wellnigh vanished age of the 
leisurely ploughing by oxen entered into most of the languages of modern Europe. 
We have Arresia hue in Italian, ArrHe-boeuf in French, Rete-heuf in Guernsey, and 
Restahoy in Portuguese ; it appears as Raslylbow in the “Promptorium Parvulorum” of 
the fifteenth century, as Ochsenbrech in German, as Ossenbrecke in Dutch ; and in 
Spanish we have Detienebuey and Remora de arado. As Lyte graphically puts it : — 
“ The roote is long and very limmer, spreading his branches both large and long under the earth, and doth oftentimes let, 
hinder, and staye, both the plough and oxen in toyling the ground, for they be so tough and limmer that the share and colter of 
the plough cannot easily divide, and cut them asunder.” 
The genus Ononis, though agreeing with the Genistece in being monadelphous, is 
placed by Hooker, Taubert, and other authorities in a Tribe Trifoliece, with Melilotus, 
Trifolium, and other genera, with which it agrees in having trefoil leaves generally 
with toothed margins. It comprises some eighty species, natives mainly of the sunny 
Mediterranean region, with pink, white, or yellow honeyless blossoms ; but there 
has been considerable difficulty in unravelling the relationship of the various forms 
