e. The idea was doubtless to extract the sap, for the application of
thistle-juice and the juice of the ranunculus are said to prove
efficacious in removing warts. In Devonshire they use the juice of an
apple, but in some parts of the country rue is preferred. Other
wart-curing plants are the spurge, the poppy, the celandine, the
marigold, the briony, and the crowfoot.

As old Michael Drayton remarked:

'In medicine, simples had the power
That none need then the planetary hour
To helpe their workinge, they so juiceful were.'

There is a substratum of truth in this, although it requires a wide
stretch of imagination, as well as a profundity of faith, to believe
that consumption can be cured by passing the body of the patient three
times through a wreath of woodbine cut during the increase of the March
moon. Yet to this day some French peasants believe that the curative
properties of vervain are most pronounced when the plant is gathered,
with proper invocations, at a certain phase of the moon.

The notion that animals are acquainted with the medical properties of
plants is an old one, probably older than either Pliny or Aristotle. Our
own Gerarde, the herbalist, tells that the name celandine was given to
that flower (which Wordsworth loved) from a word meaning swallow,
because it is used by swallows to 'restore sight to their young ones
when their eyes be put out.'

Then Coles, the old botanist, also writes: 'It is known to such as have
skill of Nature what wonderful care she hath of the smallest creatures,
giving to them a knowledge of medicine to help themselves, if haply
diseases are among them. The swallow cureth her dim eyes with Celandine:
the wesell knoweth well the virtue of Herb Grace: the dove the verven:
the dogge dischargeth his mawe with a kind of grass: and too long it
were to reckon up all the medicines which the beasts are known to use by
Nature's direction only.'

A Warwickshire proverb runs to this effect:

'Plant your sage and rue together,
The sage will grow in any weather,'

the meaning of which is not very clear--but obscurity is a common
complaint of rhymed proverbs. Another rhyme, however, in which rue
appears, has a more practical note:

'What savour is better, if physicke be true,
For places infected, than wormwood and rue?'

Rue, indeed, seems to have been in special request as a disinfectant
long before carbolic acid was invented, or Condy heard of, yet, perhaps,
co