FOOTNOTES:
[40] Leprosy has been traced to Asia and the Crusades; but Europe had it in herself. The war declared by the Middle Ages against the flesh and all cleanliness bore its fruits. More than one saint boasted of having never washed even his hands. And how much did the rest wash? To have stripped for a moment would have been sinful. The worldlings carefully follow the teaching of the monks. This subtle and refined society, which sacrificed marriage and seemed inspired only with the poetry of adultery, preserved a strange scruple on a point so harmless. It dreaded all cleansing, as so much defilement. There was no bathing for a thousand years!
[41] The name given in fear and politeness to the witches.
[42] Man’s ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other plants have come into use: a hundred exotic vegetables have become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor Comforters is clean forgotten!—Nay, who now remembers or even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless nature? The Asclepias acida, Sarcostemma, or flesh-plant, which for five thousand years was the Holy Wafer of the East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred millions of men,—this plant, in the Middle Ages called the Poison-queller (vince-venenum), meets with not one word of historical comment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois on the Soma of India and the Hom of Persia. Mem. de l’Académie des Inscriptions, xix. 326.
[43] M. d’Orbigny’s Dictionary of Natural History, article Morelles.
[44] I have found this ladder nowhere else. It is the more important, because the witches who made these essays at the risk of passing for poisoners, certainly began with the weakest, and rose gradually to the strongest. Each step of power thus gives its relative date, and helps us in this dark subject to set up a kind of chronology. I shall complete it in the following chapters, when I come to speak of the Mandragora and the Datura. I have chiefly followed Pouchet’s Solanées and Botanique Générale.
[45] Madame La Chapelle and M. Chaussier have renewed to good purpose these practices of the older medicine. Pouchet, Solanées.
[46] We should think that few physicians would quite agree with M. Michelet.—Trans.
[47] Cider was first made in the twelfth century.
[48] This great discovery was made by Claude Bernard.