56 
FERNS. 
[P ter is. 
by pigs, and have even been dried and ground for bread, but only in times of the 
greatest scarcity. Upon being boiled they yield a strong mucilage. The peasants 
of most parts of the kingdom assert their right to it as fuel, and use it chiefly to 
heat their ovens, a purpose for which it is well adapted, as it burns furiously. It 
is so valuable to the farmer of Germany for cattle fodder that it is an article of 
ready sale there, and the cutting of it subject to very severe forest laws. 
It remains dormant during more than half the year, the fronds not appearing 
till the middle of May, and being cut off with the first slight frost of autumn. 
It is also very impatient under culture : to remove a root otherwise than with a 
considerable quantity of earth attached to it, or in any season but that of its 
torpidity, would assuredly destroy it, as would also cutting down the fronds three 
or four seasons in succession. The remarkable paucity of young fern plants, of 
almost every species, must have struck the attention of most botanists. A single 
frond of Pteris aquilina produces more seed than any number the mind can con- 
ceive ; millions of fronds do often extend over a waste or park, yet how rarely is 
a young plant to be discovered anywhere. Indeed, had young plants been fre- 
quent, our ancestors could scarcely have imbibed the notion that they yielded no 
seed, or that it was a rarity, and only to be procured at the exact hour of the 
night on which John the Baptist was born. Pliny says, “ of fern be two kinds, 
and they bear neither flower nor seed.” Culpepper writing upon this Fern, 
which was in his time called Female Fern, “ the seed of which,” he observes, 
“ some authors hold to be so rare,” says, “ such a thing there is, I know, and 
may be easily had upon Midsummer eve, and for aught I know, two or three days 
after it, if not more.” The supposed circumstance of its seeding upon a single 
night, occasioned it to be called in Brown’s Pastoral Ballads (1613) — 
“ The wondrous, one-night-seeding feme,” 
Butler alludes to this superstitious notion (Iludibras, Part III, cant, iii, 3, 4): 
“ Thatspring like fern, that insect weed, 
Equivocally without seed.” 
Absurd as these notions are, they were not wholly exploded in the 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.” Then again, in 
the dawn of botany and medicine, when affinities and antipathies, or, as it was 
called, the doctrine of signatures, was supposed to rule all things, we find that 
this Fern must be good for reed wounds, (punctured wounds), because, Dioscorides 
saith, “ the fern dietli if the reed be planted about it ; and, contrarywise, that the 
reed dieth if it be compassed with fern,” which, as Gerard justly tells us, “ is vaine 
to thinke that it hapneth by any antipathic or naturall hatred, and not by reason 
that this feme prospereth not in moist places, nor the reed in dry.” Another 
result of the admirable and scientific reasoning of Dioscorides was once prevalent 
in this country, that, because Fern seed was invisible, therefore forsooth, those 
who carried it about them were rendered invisible also. This circumstance relative 
to Fern seed is alluded to in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘ Fair Maid of the Inn 
“ Had you Gyges’ ring ? 
Or the herb that gives invisibility ?” 
Again, in Ben Jonson’s play of the * New Inn 
“ I had 
No medicine. Sir, to go invisible. 
No Fern seed in my pocket.” 
