BOTRYCHIDM LUNABIA. 87 
dreams and illusions ; but it is singular for wounds, as 
aforesaid." 
Bauhiu, in his Historia Plantarum, gives a copious 
account of this Fern, with three very good delineations 
of it and it varieties. He says the alchymists employed 
its juice for fixing Mercury. 
Coles, in his Adam in Eden, p. 561, tells us; " It is 
said, yea, and believed by many, that moontcort will 
open the locks wherewith dwelling-houses are made fast, 
if it be put in the key-hole ; 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 Gulpeper, who, though be 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 drawn up in a body, many of them lost 
their shoes upon White Dowue ,in Devonshire, near 
Tiverton, because moonwort grows upon heaths." Turner, 
in his British Physician, 8vo. Lond. 1687, p. 209, is 
confident that though moonwort " be the moon's herb, 
yet it is neither smith, farrier, nor picklock." Withers, 
in allusion to the supposed virtues of the moonwort, in 
the introduction to his Abuses Stript and Whipt, 1622, 
says: 
" There is an herb, some say, whose vertue's such 
It in the pasture, only with a touch,' 
Unshooes the new-shod steed." 
To induce it to grow in a Fern garden it should be 
moved with a square foot of the turf in which it is 
growing, and as much of depth of the soil undisturbed, 
