The Folk-lore of Plants

On the other hand, certain plants have been credited at most periods with hurtful and injurious properties. Thus, there is a popular idea that during the flowering of the bean more cases of lunacy occur than at any other season. [17] It is curious to find the apple--such a widespread curative--regarded as a bane, an illustration of which is given by Mr. Conway. [18] In Swabia it is said that an apple plucked from a graft on the whitethorn will, if eaten by a pregnant woman, increase her pains. On the Continent, the elder, when used as a birch, is said to check boys' growth, a property ascribed to the knot-grass, as in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" (Act ii. sc. 2):-- "We want a boy extremely for this function, Kept under for a year with milk and knot-grass." The cat-mint, when chewed, created quarrelsomeness, a property said by the Italians to belong to the rampion. Occasionally much attention in folk-medicine has been paid to lucky numbers; a remedy, in order to prove efficacious, having to be performed in accordance with certain numerical rules. In Devonshire, poultices must be made of seven different kinds of herbs, and a cure for thrush is this:--"Three rushes are taken from any running stream, passed separately through the mouth of the infant, and then thrown back into the water. As the current bears them away, so, it is believed, will the thrush leave the child."