han wormwood and rue?"

For depression, thyme was recommended, and a Manx preservative against
all kinds of infectious diseases is ragwort. The illustrations we have
given above show in how many ways plants have been in demand as popular
curatives. And although an immense amount of superstition has been
interwoven with folk-medicine, there is a certain amount of truth in the
many remedies which for centuries have been, with more or less success,
employed by the peasantry, both at home and abroad.

Footnotes:

1. See Tylor's "Primitive Culture," ii.

2. See Folkard's "Plant-lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 164.

3. "Mystic Trees and Shrubs," p. 717.

4. Folkard's "Plant-lore," p. 379.

5. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England," 1871, p. 415

6. Folkard's "Plant-lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 216.

7. See Black's "Folk-medicine," 1883, p.195.

8. _Quarterly Review_, cxiv. 245.

9. "Sacred Trees and Flowers," _Quarterly Review_, cxiv. 244.

10. Folkard's "Plant Legends," 364.

11. _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 591.

12. "Mystic Trees and Plants;" _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 708.

13. "Reliquiae Antiquse," Wright and Halliwell, i. 195; _Quarterly Review_,
1863, cxiv. 241.

14. Coles, "The Art of Simpling," 1656.

15. Anne Pratt's "Flowering Plants of Great Britain," iv. 9.

16. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 201.

17. Folkard's "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 248.

18. _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 591.

19. "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 349.

20. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 185.

21. See Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England."

22. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 193.

23. "Rabies or Hydrophobia," T. M. Dolan, 1879, p. 238.

24. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 193.

CHAPTER XXII.

PLANTS AND THEIR LEGENDARY HISTORY.

Many of the legends of the plant-world have been incidentally alluded to
in the preceding pages. Whether we review their mythological history as
embodied in the traditionary stories of primitive times, or turn to the
existing legends of our own and other countries in modern times, it is
clear that the imagination has at all times bestowed some of its richest
and most beautiful fancies on trees and flowers. Even, too, the rude and
ignorant savage has clothed with graceful conceptions many of the plants
which, either for their grandeur or utility, have attracted his notice.
The old idea, again, of metamorphosis, by which persons under certain
p