ich hath got the
denomination of milasea. Its height is commonly of five or six foot. Yet
sometimes it is of such a tall growth as doth surpass the length of a
lance, but that is only when it meeteth with a sweet, easy, warm, wet, and
well-soaked soil--as is the ground of the territory of Olone, and that of
Rasea, near to Preneste in Sabinia--and that it want not for rain enough
about the season of the fishers' holidays and the estival solstice. There
are many trees whose height is by it very far exceeded, and you might call
it dendromalache by the authority of Theophrastus. The plant every year
perisheth,--the tree neither in the trunk, root, bark, or boughs being
durable.

From the stalk of this Pantagruelian plant there issue forth several large
and great branches, whose leaves have thrice as much length as breadth,
always green, roughish, and rugged like the orcanet, or Spanish bugloss,
hardish, slit round about like unto a sickle, or as the saxifragum, betony,
and finally ending as it were in the points of a Macedonian spear, or of
such a lancet as surgeons commonly make use of in their phlebotomizing
tiltings. The figure and shape of the leaves thereof is not much different
from that of those of the ash-tree, or of agrimony; the herb itself being
so like the Eupatorian plant that many skilful herbalists have called it
the Domestic Eupator, and the Eupator the Wild Pantagruelion. These leaves
are in equal and parallel distances spread around the stalk by the number
in every rank either of five or seven, nature having so highly favoured and
cherished this plant that she hath richly adorned it with these two odd,
divine, and mysterious numbers. The smell thereof is somewhat strong, and
not very pleasing to nice, tender, and delicate noses. The seed enclosed
therein mounteth up to the very top of its stalk, and a little above it.

This is a numerous herb; for there is no less abundance of it than of any
other whatsoever. Some of these plants are spherical, some rhomboid, and
some of an oblong shape, and all of those either black, bright-coloured, or
tawny, rude to the touch, and mantled with a quickly-blasted-away coat, yet
such a one as is of a delicious taste and savour to all shrill and
sweetly-singing birds, such as linnets, goldfinches, larks, canary birds,
yellow-hammers, and others of that airy chirping choir; but it would quite
extinguish the natural heat and procreative virtue of the semence of any
m