have gained a
notoriety, purely fabulous, through trickery and credulity. About the
middle of the last century, for instance, there was the groaning-tree at
Badesly, which created considerable sensation. It appears that a
cottager, who lived in the village of Badesly, two miles from Lymington,
frequently heard a strange noise behind his house, like a person in
extreme agony. For about twenty months this tree was an object of
astonishment, and at last the owner of the tree, in order to discover
the cause of its supposed sufferings, bored a hole in the trunk. After
this operation it ceased to groan, it was rooted up, but nothing
appeared to account for its strange peculiarity. Stories of this kind
remind us of similar wonders recorded by Sir John Maundeville, as having
been seen by him in the course of his Eastern travels. Thus he describes
a certain table of ebony or blackwood, "that once used to turn into
flesh on certain occasions, but whence now drops only oil, which, if
kept above a year, becomes good flesh and bone."

Footnotes:

1. Laing's "History of Scotland," 1800, ii. p. II.

2. "Flower-lore," p. 46.

CHAPTER XVI.

DOCTRINE OF SIGNATURES.

The old medical theory, which supposed that plants by their external
character indicated the particular diseases for which Nature had
intended them as remedies, was simply a development of the much older
notion of a real connection between object and image. Thus, on this
principle, it was asserted that the properties of substances were
frequently denoted by their colour; hence, white was regarded as
refrigerant, and red as hot. In the same way, for disorders of the
blood, burnt purple, pomegranate seeds, mulberries, and other red
ingredients were dissolved in the patient's drink; and for liver
complaints yellow substances were recommended. But this fanciful and
erroneous notion "led to serious errors in practice," [1] and was
occasionally productive of the most fatal results. Although, indeed,
Pliny spoke of the folly of the magicians in using the catanance
(Greek: katanhankae, compulsion) for love-potions, on account of its
shrinking "in drying into the shape of the claws of a dead kite," [2] and
so holding the patient fast; yet this primitive idea, after the lapse of
centuries, was as fully credited as in the early days when it was
originally started. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
for instance, it is noticed in most medical works,