160 LASTK^A FILI L-MAS. 
" Again, in Philemon Holland's Translation of Pliny, 
book xxvii. ch. 9 : ' Of Feme be two kinds, and they beare 
neither floure nor seed.' The ancients, who often paid more 
attention to received opinions than to the evidence of their 
senses, believed that Fern bore no seed. Our ancestors 
imagined that this plant produced seed which was invisible. 
Hence, from an extraordinary mode of reasoning, founded 
on the fantastic doctrine of signatures, they concluded that 
they who possessed the secret of wearing this seed about 
them would become invisible. This superstition Shak- 
speare's good sense taught him to ridicule. It was also 
supposed to seed in the course of a single night, and is 
called, in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, 1613, 
' The wond'rous one-night-seeding Feme.' 
" Absurd as these notions are, they were not wholly ex- 
ploded in tlie time of Addison. He laughs at a doctor who 
was arrived at the knowledge of the green and red dragon, 
and had discovered the female Fern-seed." ( Tattler, No. 
240. Brand's Popular Antiquities.) 
Not only were these superstitions not exploded in the 
time of Addison, but they linger still in some of the 
rustic corners of our land. Thus Mr. Edwin Lees, in 
his recent work, " Pictures of Nature in the Silurian 
Kegion round Malvern Hills," says : 
" The country-people in Worcestershire, as my antiquarian 
friend Mr. Jabez Allies informs me, still traditionally keep 
up the old belief in the mystic powers of the ' Fern-seed,' 
which was supposed to make the gatherer ' walk invisible.' 
The saying is, that the Fern blooms and seeds only at 
twelve o'clock on Midsummer night; and to catch the seed 
sun-rising, and before you take it out of the ground say these word* 
following, &c., and gather the Fern-seed on Midsomer Eve betweene 11 
and 12 at noone and at night." MS. temp. Eliz.] 
