ON PLANTS IN RELATION TO ANIMALS. 
95 
All the forms that we meet with appear to be wholly agrarian, 
growing in every hit of cultivated ground, whether in the field 
or in the garden ; it is, therefore, highly probable that they 
have been introduced with foreign seeds, and, therefore, that 
they may partake of those slight variations which they possess 
from being natives of different countries and climates. 
The following notes convey much that is interesting with 
regard to the genus: 
Common Fumitory , Common Earth Smoke . 
In Kent this is often called wax dolls, from the doll- 
like appearance of the little flowers. This plant is found 
more or less wherever corn is cultivated. Though a 
persevering and troublesome weed, it is one the appearance 
of which every farmer may regard as an indication of 
good, deep, and rich land—a circumstance not un¬ 
noticed by England’s greatest poet when speaking of the 
rich but unproductive soil of France, laid bare and left 
uncultivated by the horrors of war. He makes the Duke 
of Burgundy, in the play of “ King Henry V,” to say : 
“ Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace, 
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births. 
Should not, in this best garden of the world, 
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage ? 
Alas ! she hath from France too long been chased, 
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, 
Corrupting in its own fertility. 
Her viue, the merry cheerer of the heart, 
Unpruned dies ; her hedges even pleach’d. 
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, 
Put forth disordered twigs ; her fallow leas 
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory , 
Doth root upon.” 
And, again, in “ King Lear/’ Cordelia says : 
“ Alack ! ’tis he ; why, he was met even now, 
As mad as the vex’d sea,—singing aloud, 
Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, 
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, 
Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow 
In our sustaining corn.” 
The expressed juice of this plant was at one time a 
favourite remedy with herbalists for skin diseases, and had 
a reputation as an anti-scorbutic. 
Mr. T. J. Pettigew has secured an old medical manuscript 
from the Royal Library at Stockholm, which is traced 
back to the fourteenth century, and is supposed to be a 
poetical “ system of health,” composed by the celebrated 
