y his tutor in nine days of a cataract by only applying
the roots of Fennel with the decoction to his eyes.

In the Elizabethan age the herb was quoted as an emblem of flattery;
and Lily wrote, "Little things catch light minds; and fancie is a
worm that feedeth first upon Fennel." Again, Milton says, in
_Paradise Lost_, Book XI:--

"The savoury odour blown,
Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense
Than smell of sweetest Fennel."

Shakespeare makes the sister of Laertes say to the King, in
_Hamlet_, when wishing to prick the royal conscience, "There's
Fennel for you." And Falstaff commends Poins thus, in _Henry the
Fourth_, "He plays at quoits well, and eats conger, and Fennel."

The Italians take blanched stalks of the cultivated Fennel (which
they call _Cartucci_) as a salad; and in Germany its seeds are added
to bread as a condiment, much as we put caraways in some of our
cakes. The leaves are eaten raw with pickled fish to correct its oily
indigestibility. Evelyn says the peeled stalks, soft and white, when
"dressed like salery," exercise a pleasant action conducive to sleep.
Roman bakers put the herb under their loaves in the oven to make
the bread taste agreeably.

Chemically, the cultivated Fennel plant furnishes a volatile aromatic
oil, a fixed fatty principle, sugar, and some [181] in the root; also a
bitter resinous extract. It is an admirable corrective of flatulence;
and yields an essential oil, of which from two to four drops taken on
a lump of sugar will promptly relieve griping of the bowels with
distension. Likewise a hot infusion, made by pouring half-a-pint of
boiling water on a teaspoonful of the bruised seeds will comfort
belly ache in the infant, if given in teaspoonful doses sweetened
with sugar, and will prove an active remedy in promoting female
monthly regularity, if taken at the periodical times, in doses of a
wineglassful three times in the day. Gerard says, "The green leaves
of the Fennel eaten, or the seed made into a ptisan, and drunk, do fill
women's brestes with milk; also the seed if drunk asswageath the
wambling of the stomacke, and breaketh the winde." The essential
oil corresponds in composition to that of anise, but contains a
special camphoraceous body of its own; whilst its vapour will cause
the tears and the saliva to flow. A syrup prepared from the
expressed juice was formerly given for chronic coughs.

W. Coles teaches in _Nature's Paradise_,