Page:Leechdoms wortcunning and starcraft of early England volume 1.djvu/24

 The same victory over future ages which puts into the hands of our children a Virgilius, a Demosthenes an Horatius, produced a similar effect upon our forefathers. When their driving, conquering, advancing spirit brought them into the island of the Britons and gave them the Keltic careless tribes for a prey, they also found it worth their while to inquire what was this system of Latin science, which raised fertile crops of wheat for the food of every mouth, built houses which gave warmth amid the tempest, and fetched from foreign distant lands aids and helps whether to health or to disease; and they, like ourselves, became students of Latin and Greek. Something of course they had learned of southern arts before, but when they arrived in and became owners of territories improved by the southron, they could only enjoy their new acquisitions fully by understanding the method of ordering them.

The Gothic nations had a knowledge of their own in the kinds and powers of worts, that is they had the more useful practical part of botany; this is plainly proved by the great number of native names of plants which are found in the works now printed, in glossaries, and in the Gothic languages generally. Their medicine must have consisted partly in the application of the qualities of these worts to healing purposes, for otherwise the study was of no real utility. The uses of hemp and liquorice were first learnt by the Hellenes, from the Skythians. The Saxons evidently were also willing to rely much upon amulets and incantations, for while these resources are accepted by the later Greek physicians, they occur much more frequently as the northern nations obtained a wider footing in the Roman empire.