Text-fig. 106. “Alkekengi” = Physalis, Winter Cherry [Blankaart, Neder-landschen Herbarius, 1698].
CHAPTER VIII
THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNATURES AND ASTROLOGICAL BOTANY
URING the preceding chapters, we have restricted our discussion to those writings which may be credited with having taken some part, however slight, in advancing the knowledge of plants. We have, as it were, confined our attention to the main stream of botanical progress, and its tributaries. But before concluding, it may be well to call to mind the existence of more than one backwater, connected indeed with the main channel, but leading nowhere.
The subject of the superstitions, with which herb collecting has been hedged about at different periods, is far too wide to be dealt with in detail in the present book. We have referred in earlier chapters to the observances with which the Greek herb-gatherers surrounded their calling (p. 7) and to the mysterious dangers which are described in the ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius as attending the uprooting of the Mandrake (p. 36). There is comparatively little reference to such matters in the works of the German Fathers of Botany or those of the greatest of their successors; indeed, as we have previously mentioned (pp. [55]-58, [103], [104]), Bock’s famous ‘Kreuter Bůch’ and William Turner’s herbal contain definite refutations of various superstitions.
Contemporaneously, however, with the fine series of herbals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there appeared a succession of books about plants, which had as their subjects one or both of two topics—the “doctrine of signatures,” and “astrological botany.” These works cannot be said to have furthered the science to any appreciable extent, but they have considerable interest, rather on account of the curious light which they throw upon the attitude of mind of their writers (and presumably their readers also) than from any intrinsic merit. One of these authors, in his preface, speaks of the “Notions” and “Observations” contained in his work, “most of which I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant.” The excuse that the “Notions,” cherished by the botanical mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were “pleasant,” even if untrue, may perhaps be offered in extenuation of the very brief discussion of their salient points, which we propose to undertake in the present chapter.