There is an old belief that Mushrooms which grow near iron, copper, or other metals, are poisonous; the same idea is found in the custom of putting a piece of metal in the water used for boiling Mushrooms, in order that it should attract and detach any poison from the Mushrooms, and thus render them innocuous.——Bacon characterises Mushrooms as “venereous meat,” but Gerarde remarks that “few of them are good to be eaten, and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. Therefore, I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new-fangled meates, to beware of licking honey among thornes, least the sweetnesse of the one do not countervaile the sharpnesse and pricking of the other.”——The Burman, if he comes across Mushrooms at the beginning of a journey, considers it as a most fortunate omen.——Dream oracles state that Mushrooms forbode fleeting happiness; and that to dream of gathering them indicates a lack of attachment on the part of lover or consort.
MUSTARD.—Among the Jews, “Small as a grain of Mustard-seed” was a common comparison; and our Saviour referred to it as being “the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof” (Matthew xiii., 31, 32). The Mustard-tree here alluded to is not, however, the English Mustard (Sinapis nigra), but a tree called by the Arabs Khardal (Salvadora Persica), a tree with numerous branches, among which birds may take shelter, while the seed is exceedingly small. In the north-west of India, this plant is known as Kharjal.——One of the Sanscrit names given to the Mustard-tree is the She-devil or Witch. By means of the seed the Hindus discover witches. During the night they light lamps and fill certain vessels with water, into which they gently drop Mustard-seed oil, pronouncing the while the name of every woman in the village. If, during this ceremony, as they pronounce the name of a woman, they notice the shadow of a female in the water, it is a sure sign that such woman is a witch.——In India, the Mustard-seed symbolises generation: thus, in the Hindu myth of the ‘Rose of Bakawali,’ the king of Ceylon destroys the temple in which the nymph Bakawali is incarcerated; having been condemned by Indra to remain there transformed into marble for the space of twelve years. A husbandman ploughs over the site of this temple, and sows a Mustard-seed. In course of time the Mustard ripens, is gathered, pressed, boiled, and the oil extracted. According to the custom of his class, the husbandman first tastes it, and then his wife: immediately she, who before had been childless, conceives, and nine months afterwards gives to the world a daughter (Bakawali), beauteous as a fairy.
MYROBALAN.—The Myrobalan Plum-tree produces a fruit similar to a Cherry, but containing only a juice of so disagreeable a flavour that the very birds refuse to feed upon it: the fruit, however, is much employed in Indian medicines. According to Hindu tradition, the wife of Somaçarman struck twice with a wand a Myrobalan-tree, whereupon the tree rose from the earth with her, and carrying her away, at last placed her on a golden hill in a golden town.
MYRRH.—Myrrh is an exudation from the tree Balsamodendron Myrrha; but the precious resin was held by the ancients to have been first produced by the tears of Myrrha, daughter of Cinyras, King of Cyprus, and mother of Adonis. Flying from the avenging sword of her father, for whom she had conceived an incestuous passion, the guilty Myrrha, after long and weary wanderings, reached the Arabian continent, and at length, in the Sabæan fields, overcome with fatigue and the misery of her situation, prayed with her dying breath to the gods to accept her penitence and to bestow upon her, as a punishment for her sin, a middle state “betwixt the realms above and those below.” “Some other form,” cries she, “to wretched Myrrha give, nor let her wholly die, nor wholly live.”
“The prayers of penitents are never vain;
At least she did her last request obtain.
For while she spake the ground began to rise
And gathered round her feet, her legs, and thighs;
Her toes in roots descend, and, spreading wide,
A firm foundation for the trunk provide: