Place.] These grow in moist meadows of this land, and are easy to be found being well sought for among the grass, wherein many times they lay hid scarcely to be discerned.
Time.] They flower about July, and their seed is ripe in August.
Government and virtues.] They are both of them herbs of the Moon. The Saxifrages are hot as pepper; and Tragus saith, by his experience, that they are wholesome. They have the same properties the parsleys have, but in provoking urine, and causing the pains thereof, and of the wind and colic, are much more effectual, the roots or seed being used either in powder, or in decoctions, or any other way; and likewise helps the windy pains of the mother, and to procure their courses, and to break and void the stone in the kidneys, to digest cold, viscous, and tough phlegm in the stomach, and is an especial remedy against all kind of venom. Castoreum being boiled in the distilled water thereof, is singularly good to be given to those that are troubled with cramps and convulsions. Some do use to make the seeds into comfits (as they do carraway seeds) which is effectual to all the purposes aforesaid. The juice of the herb dropped into the most grievous wounds of the head, dries up their moisture, and heals them quickly. Some women use the distilled water to take away freckles or spots in the skin or face; and to drink the same sweetened with sugar for all the purposes aforesaid.
SCABIOUS, THREE SORTS.
Descript.] Common field Scabious grows up with many hairy, soft, whitish green leaves, some whereof are very little, if at all jagged on the edges, others very much rent and torn on the sides, and have threads in them, which upon breaking may be plainly seen; from among which rise up divers hairy green stalks, three or four feet high, with such like hairy green leaves on them, but more deeply and finely divided and branched forth a little: At the tops thereof, which are naked and bare of leaves for a good space, stand round heads of flowers, of a pale blueish colour, set together in a head, the outermost whereof are larger than the inward, with many threads also in the middle, somewhat flat at the top, as the head with the seed is likewise; the root is great, white and thick, growing down deep into the ground, and abides many years.
There is another sort of Field Scabious different in nothing from the former, but only it is smaller in all respects.
The Corn Scabious differs little from the first, but that it is greater in all respects, and the flowers more inclining to purple, and the root creeps under the upper crust of the earth, and runs not deep into the ground as the first doth.
Place.] The first grows more usually in meadows, especially about London every where.
The second in some of the dry fields about this city, but not so plentifully as the former.
The third in standing corn, or fallow fields, and the borders of such like fields.