Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/413

Rh Dioscorides, from Pliny and Galen, and from his contemporaries, Gesner and Fuchsius and Lonicerus. His classification was based on Dr. Priest's translation of Dodoneus, published in 1583, but in the details of arrangement he more closely followed Lobel,

His special excellence was in the careful enumeration of native plants, in the loving study of their properties, real or imagined, and in the vivid descriptions which, with his faithful drawings of English plants, make him an authority in cases of disputed nomenclature. Other cuts in the Herball are from the Kreuterbuch of Tabernæmontanus, published at Frankfort in 1588, and used by Dodoneus, by Lobel, and by Clusius.

He delights also in the old English names of plants, and one reads of goldes and of paigles, of pawnee and of floramour, as on a page of Chaucer or of Spenser. Much of the best poetry of plant lore is found in the unconscious charm of his writing. Through it all runs the current of conscientious adherence to truth as he could best discover it. His most marvelous ascriptions of "vertue" to any plant, if not tested by himself, are qualified by "I have heard it reported." He denounces all "ridiculous tales, whether of old wives or some runnagate surgeons and physicke-mongers," and is slow to accept mere hearsay. With every plant he treats in a separate section "The Kindes," "The Description," "The Places," "The Names," "The Temperatures," and "The Vertues" of each. He mentions those which "doe grow in my Garden" with especial tenderness, and one can almost hear the sigh with which he sometimes confesses, "this, I have not seene."

The American genus of the family Scrophulariaceæ which bears the name of Gerardia includes two groups of plants, related in structure, but very different in appearance. The false foxgloves are stout herbs, the various species from two to five feet in height. In some, the reddish stems are covered with the blue bloom of raspberry briers. In others, the glaucous growth is replaced by a delicate pubescence. The leaves, sinuate or pinnatifid, are thick and usually a bluish green, although in Gerardia pedicularia they are thin, pale green, and downy, and in the southern Gerardia pectinata they are decidedly hairy. The exquisite yellow of the flowers is the very tint of the butterflies, at their blooming, hovering in thousands over the country roads. The corollas are more open than those of the English foxglove, to which it has little resemblance, and the flaring flowers would furnish better hats than gloves for the little folk in green. Indeed, this etymology of the common name of the Digitalis may well be questioned. So careful a student of plant lore as Hilderic Friend says "fox" is not a corruption of "folk," but that the name was probably first fox-gleow—gleow,