besides dill, fennel, and lovage, the parsnip is the only one which has yellow flowers; at any rate I know of no other with yellow flowers and esculent roots. If the parsnip had no other names among the Greeks and the Romans, it must have been very little used by them; for it is mentioned only by Dioscorides and Pliny. At present we know that it forms excellent fodder for black cattle, sheep, and swine. It needs, however, excite little wonder that it is so difficult to discover these plants in the works of the Greeks and the Romans. They all belong to one natural order, the specics of which can with difficulty be distinguished by the most expert botanist. I mean to say, that all the umbelliferous plants are so like to each other, that they may be readily confounded. This difficulty is still further increased by the old phycisians, who used a great many plants of this kind, and named them after the kitchen vegetables to which they had a resemblance, so that by these means plants totally different occur under the same name. To distinguish these, it is necessary first to examine which of them was a kitchen vegetable, and which was used in medicine. Among our kitchen vegetables, as among the spices, there are many kinds which, at first, were known only on account of their medicinal properties, but afterwards were esteemed and cultivated on account of their good taste. Of this kind is the scorzonera,* which became first known in the middle of the sixteenth century, in Spain, where it was considered as an antidote to the poison of a snake called there scurzo. A Moor, who had learnt this property of it in Africa, cured with the juice of the leaves and the roots a great many peasants bitten by snakes while mowing; but he would not discover the plant, that he might retain all the advantage to himself. Some persons, however, who followed him to the mountains, where he collected it, observed that it was the scurzonera, or scorzonera hispanica, so called from the name of the snake. Petrus Cannizer transmitted the plant, together with a drawing of it, to John Odorich Melchior, phycisian to the queen of Bohemia; and the latter sent what he had obtained to Matthioli, who at that time was not acquainted with it. Soon after, the roots were extolled in a particular tract by Nicholas Monardes, as a powerful remedy for the poison of snakes. It is probable, also that these roots were first used in Spain as food, and about the beginning of the sixteenth century were carried thence to France. The anonymous author of the well-known work Le Jardinier * Kerner, Tab. 91. ↑ Matthioli Epistol. Medicinal. v. p. 209; at the end of Matthioli Opera, Basiliæ 1674, fol. The letters have no dates, but the first edition seems to have been printed in 1561. A translation of this Tract may be seen in Clusii Exotica, p. 15. It was printed for the first time in Spanish in 1569. See Bayle Diction. Histor. iii. p. 410; and Haller's Biblioth. Botan. i. p. 334. François, who was a gardener, and dealt in trees and seeds at Paris, boasts of having been the first who introduced these roots into the French gardens. The first edition of his book, which greatly contributed to improve gardening in France, was printed in 1616. At present, the roots of the scorzonera are to be found in most gardens, but no one places faith in their medicinal virtue; and when they are occasionally prescribed by any physician for a ptisan perhaps, the other kind, the scorzonera humilis, is preferred, though in the apothecary's shops the Spanish, taken from the gardens, is used in its stead.†. Among our species of the allium genus, shallots, in consequence of their mild taste, are preferred. There can be no doubt that this name, as well as the French echalotte, is derived from Ascalonia; and the above species in the system is called AlEium ascalonium. Theophrastus, § Pliny, || Columella, Apicius, and others, speak of a species, called ascalonia, brought from the city of Ascalon, in Palestine, as we are told by Pliny, Strabo, and Stephanus. The last-mentioned author states it * Haller's Biblioth. Bot. i. p. 421. Lüder's Küchengarten-briefe Dritter Theile. Hannov. 1779, 8vo. p. 363. Murray, Apparat. Medicam. i. p. 169, according to the second edition. Kerner, Tab. 307. § Hist. Plant. vii. 4, p. 761, ed. Heinsii, p. 138. Lib. xix. 6, sect. 32, p. 170. Steph. Byzant. de Urbibus, v. Acxañw›, p. 122. as a report, that the first bulbs were observed in that neighbourhood. These names are found in the oldest catalogues of the German garden vegetables. There is sufficient reason also to conjecture that our shallots were the ascalonic of the ancients, and that they came originally from Palestine; especially as Hasselquist found the same species growing there wild. An important doubt, however, against this opinion arises from what is said by Theophrastus and Pliny; namely, that their ascaloniæ, could not be propagated by bulbs, but by seeds on the other hand, our shallots, in Germany, and perhaps in every other part of Europe, never come to flower, and are obtained only by the bulbs; so that Linnæus procured the first flowers, through Hasselquist, from Palestine. But why should not all the other allium species be propagated by planting the bulbs? * Caroli M. Capitulare de Villis, § 70, in Brun's Beyträgen zu den Teutschen Rechten. Helmst. 1799, 8vo. p. 40. + Cepa fissiles, or scissiles, or schista, are leeks, as Theophrastus tells us himself, which, when the leaves become yellow, are taken from the earth, and being freed from the leaves, are separated from each other, then dried, and in spring again put into the ground. If we believe that the ascalonia can be propagated only by seed, we must certainly read in Theophrastus μονα γαρ ου σχιστα, as Scaliger has already remarked. KNITTING NETS AND STOCKINGS. STOCKING-LOOM. IN the art of weaving, the woof is thrown or made to pass through the numerous threads of the warp, and is retained by them: but in knitting there is only one thread, which is entwined in so ingenious a manner that it produces a tissue approaching near to cloth both in its use and appearance, though it cannot be called cloth, because it is formed without warp and woof. I will not, however, quarrel in regard to names: the spider's web is produced by only one thread, but in a manner indeed which differs as much from weaving as it does from knitting; and it is not known with certainty whether Arachne found out the art of weaving cloth or of making nets.* There are two methods of knitting, essentially different from each other; the one employed in making nets, and the other in knitting stockings. In the former the twine is knotted into meshes by means of a knitting-needle; whereas in the knitting of stockings the meshes are produced without knots. Hence it may be readily comprehended why knit stockings can be so easily and so speedily un-knit, in order that the thread may be employed for new work; and why in nets this is * Ovidii Metamorph. vi. 5-145. Plin. Hist. nat. vii. 56. |