The Highlanders have the same opinion of the virtues of Lovage. The simplers have advised "gentlewomen" "to nourse it up in their kitchen gardens to helpe their own family and their poore neighbors that are faire remote from phisitions and Chirurgeons." They also affirm that "if a man carry about him Angelica root the witches doe have no power over him."
The nourishment in the roots of wild herbs has often kept the Indian tribes from starvation in times of scarcity of game, when they had to depend on these and on crows, eagles, and devil fish to sustain life while awaiting the "coming of the salmon," that in fishing time leaped in prodigious numbers in their rivers.
I remember reading of an especially providential instance where in a region desolated by grasshoppers the people were, for the time, sustained on the roots of herbs which these greedy cormorants had, necessarily, left intact.
For an interesting and exhaustive treatment of this branch of botanical information the reader is referred to Anna Pratt's "British Flowering Plants," a work from which much of my own knowledge has been obtained.
"If," says an old writer, "I shoulde set down all the sortes of herbes that are usually gathered for sallets I should not only speake of garden herbes, but of many herbes which grow wilde in the fieldes, or else be but weedes in a garden."
George Herbert, in his "Priest to the Temple," while enumerating the duties of the parson and his family, thus writes: "For salves his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her gardens and fields before all outlandish gums; and surely hyssop, valerian, adder's tongue, melilot, and St. John's-wort, made into a salve, and elder, comfrey, and smallage made into poultice, have done great and rare cures." And he piously adds: "In curing of any, the Parson and his family, use to premise with prayer; for this is to cure like a parson, and this raiseth the action from the Shop to the Church."
Catmint or Catnip is the "New Wine" of the Grimalkin family. It is said that it is not intoxicating to them until its odor is perceptible to their smell by breaking or bruising the plant.
Catnip is fabled to make the most gentle human beings fierce and wrathful, and it is related of a certain pusillanimous hangman that he only gained courage to perform the duties of his wretched vocation by chewing catnip root.
One who experimented with Catnip as an incitement to ferocity assures us that "for 24 hours after a dose of this root she retained a perfect equanimity of temper and feeling."