Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants: In All Ages and in All Climes
The very religions of all lands have fruits and trees in their cosmogonies, and plant-lore opens a quaint human document in its disclosure of that self-complacency which assumed the earth to be a strictly human property, in which all was for the service of man, and nothing existed of its own right. Out of this notion came the doctrine of signa tures - a system for discovering the medicinal uses of a plant from something in its external appearance that re sembled the disease it would cure. For instance, the leaves of aspen shook, hence it must be good for shaking palsy; gromwell had a stony seed, so it was prescribed for gravel; saxifrage grew in cracks in the rocks, therefore it would crack the deposits known as stone in the bladder; knots of scrophularia were prescribed for scrofulous swell ings, the pappus of scabiosa for leprosy, the spotted leaves of pulmonaria for consumption (notice how these beliefs and uses have named certain species), nettle tea was for nettle rash, blood-root for dysentery, turmeric for jaundice, because it was the color of a jaundiced skin; wood sorrel, having a heart-shaped leaf, was a cordial, or heart restora tive; liverwort corrected an inactive liver; dracontium, or herb dragon, was a cure for snake poison; briony cured dropsy, because its root suggested a swollen foot.
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