Plants. It is not possible to frame a complete definition of a plant as opposed to an animal; the most obvious distinction is that a plant is fixed, while an animal moves; and though it is quite true that plants form that kingdom of nature which is characteristically passive in its life, while the animal life is more vigorous, yet there are many animals, such as a sea-anemone, which are as fixed as a plant; and all plants are sensitive to the sun's rays, and move in response. Nor can we make a formal distinction between them in terms of the food they require; for although it is true that plants live upon simple unorganised materials, the salts and water of the soil, and the carbonic acid and oxygen of the air, and indeed serve as the source of all food for animals, yet there are many parasitic plants which live on the juices of other living creatures. What chiefly makes such a definition impossible is that at the bottom of the ladder of life there are innumerable living creatures which it is a mere formality to call either plants or animals. From such creatures as these it is possible that the two great kingdoms of nature have been evolved step by step in constantly diverging lines. But the diversity of nature of plant and animal life is such that they are mutually helpful to each other; plants having the means of feeding upon the carbonic acid of the air, using the carbon and giving out the oxygen, thus forming matter for the life of animals, who in return, by breathing out carbonic acid, help to keep the air in a fit state for plants. This mutual relation of the two kingdoms finds another expression in the aid that insects and some birds give to the higher plants, for in their search for honey they become covered with pollen, and carrying it from flower to flower secure cross-fertilisation; while it is probable that the bright colours of flowers have been to a certain extent evolved by the natural selection which the insects who visited them have exerted, by going more often to those of the brighter colour.
For the classification of plants and list of allied subjects, see BOTANY; for their life-processes, see VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY; see also the articles AGRICULTURE, BIOLOGY, CULTIVATED PLANTS, FIBROUS SUBSTANCES, FLOWER, GARDENING, and those on the great groups of plants—ALGÆ, CONIFERÆ, CYCADS, FERNS, FUNGI, &c.
MOVEMENTS OF PLANTS. The movements of plants may be divided into (1) those that take place during growth, including growth itself, many of which are common to all plants; and (2) those that may be seen in mature plants—these are rather the exception than the rule. The whole matter is fully treated in the article on Vegetable Physiology (q.v.); here a short and general account will be given.
Growth. in its rate and direction—the direction being really determined by the relative rate of various parts—is influenced by many factors; the effects of temperature, light, gravitation, and moisture are well marked.
Temperature.—There is a certain temperature at which growth is most rapid, also a minimum and a maximum at which it ceases; these points are different for different plants.
Light.—The formation of chlorophyll and therefore of starch depends, in nearly all cases, upon light, but that light generally retards growth may be seen by the long stems of plants grown in the dark, and by the bending of plants grown in a window towards the light. In a few cases, as in the older parts of the stems of ivy, growing parts turn away from the light. The rays towards the blue end of the spectrum are the most powerful in their effect upon the direction of growth.
Gravitation.—Stems generally grow upwards and roots downwards; that this is an effect of gravitation is proved by the following experiments. Place a seedling in a horizontal position; the growing tip of the stem will turn upwards and that of the root downwards. Rotate a plant slowly in a vertical plane, so as to cause the direction of gravitation to alter constantly; the direction of the growth of stem and root is irregular. Rotate a plant very rapidly, so as to introduce the so-called centrifugal force; the stem will grow towards the centre, that is, in the direction opposite to that of the acting force, and the root away from it, that is, in the direction of the acting force.
Moisture.—Roots always grow in the direction of the greatest moisture. This effect is a stronger one than that of gravitation, for if seeds germinate in a sieve filled with damp sawdust the roots at first grow downwards until they have grown through the sawdust out into the dry air; then the direction of growth changes, and the tips bend round and grow up again into the damp sawdust.
'Spontaneous' Movements of Growing Plants.—There are other movements of growing parts the causes of which are not well understood. Thus, the leaves of a young bud are kept close together, bent over the tip of the stem, by the more rapid growth of their under than of their upper surfaces. When the bud is older the upper surfaces of the leaves begin to grow more quickly than the under surfaces and the leaves unfold. Such movements are spoken of as mutations. The tips of climbing stems describe a 'circummutation' due to successive alterations in the rate of growth of the sides of the stem. It is in virtue of these movements that such plants are able to climb by twining round a support. Tendrils have similar movements, but there are further complications (see VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY). All these movements are due to unequal growth of the parts of the plants.
The Movements of Mature Plants which we have now to describe are due to alterations in the turgidity of the cells. The exciting stimulus of some of these movements is known: it may be contact, light, temperature; in other cases it is obscure, as we have found to be the case with some of the movements of growing plants.
Contact.—The leaves of the Sensitive Plant (q.v.) droop when touched or shaken; the stamens of the Berberidaceæ, when touched, bend down and come in contact with the stigma. The tentacles of Drosera bend over, and the leaflets of Venus' Fly-trap close, when an insect alights upon them (see INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS).
Light and Temperature.—Many leaves—e.g. those of Mimosa and Oxalis—move up and down with variations of light and temperature. The sleeping and waking of plants—i.e. the folding of many leaves and flowers at dusk and their opening in the morning—are familiar examples of the effect of variations in external conditions.
Spontaneous Movements of Mature Plants.—The leaves of some few plants—e.g. the Hedysarum gyrans—rotate in the dark, while the leaves of Mimosa, Oxalis, and Trifolium move up and down. These movements are not seen in daylight, probably because they are obscured by the movements due to light. The movements of the leaflets of Desmodium gyrans are dealt with at TELEGRAPH PLANT. The plasmodia of Myxomycetes creep, Bacteria and Diatoms move in a way not yet understood, Volvox swims by means of cilia, the zoospores of Algae and the antheroids of Mosses and Ferns swim after they have been set free.
MEDICINAL PLANTS.—The study of plants with genuine or fancied curative properties is as old as human thought and sickness. Even animals seek such medicines, and it must be remembered that our early ancestors were much more familiarly acquainted with fruits and seeds, roots and bulbs than are their more carnivorous descendants. But, while it may be contended that ancient medical treatment was in great part a natural return to more primitive vegetarian diet, it is obvious that men would be quick to profit by a wide and often costly experience of plants with special properties, poisonous and emetic, tonic and narcotic, excitant and sudorific. While botanical science is partly rooted in the garden, no small part of it has grown out of a primitive materia medica. Thus, in the writings of Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.) and those to which his name is extended 236 medicinal plants are recorded; the list swells in the works of Aristotle (387–322 B.C.) and Theophrastus (371–286 B.C.), while the ‘Materia Medica’ of Dioscorides (born in the 1st century A.D.) includes the names and partial descriptions of about six hundred. His work remained authoritative for fifteen centuries, and was continued on the one hand through the herbalists like Gerard and Culpepper into the botanical side of the modern pharmacopœia, on the other hand through such early botanists as Cæsalpinus into the independent—doubtless too independent—science of botany.
In connection with medicinal plants there are many interesting chapters of history with which the student should make himself acquainted—the weird stories of the old traffic in vegetable poisons; the magicians’ use of narcotics and excitants; the mystical doctrine of Signatures (q.v.), according to which plants bore signs indicative of their virtues; the gradual decay of herb gathering and the loss of much of the ancient traditional lore; the persistent record of the old uses of plants in both technical and popular names, such as Pulmonaria, Sanicula, Tussilago, and wound-wort, scurvy-grass, gout-weed; the additions to the British flora by such importations as belladonna; the elimination from the modern pharmacopœia of many vegetable drugs whose value was only fanciful; the relegation of others to the list of spices; the modern discovery or rediscovery of the potencies of Calabar bean, cinchona, coca, and many more.
See BOTANY, MATERIA MEDICA, PHARMACOPÆIA; Woodville, Medical Botany (4 vols. 1793); Hayne, Beschreibung der in Arzneikunde gebräuchlichen Gewächse (1805–46); Nees von Esenbeck, Weihe, Walter, and Funke, Sammlung der officineller Pflanzen (1821–33); Bentley and Trimen, Medicinal Plants (4 vols. Lond. 1877); Luerssen, Medicinisch-Pharmaceutische Botanik (Leip. 1877).
DISEASES OF PLANTS (Phytopathology). Scientific investigation of the diseases of plants has not till recently been so widely and systematically followed up as the economic importance of the subject deserves. Our knowledge, therefore, of the causes and of the conditions of disease in the vegetable kingdom is comparatively limited and imperfect. Enough is, however, known to establish the general conclusion that, though there is in many cases a close analogy between the diseases of plants and animals, the causes of disease are very different in their nature in the main. While bacteria and the allied Schizomycetes are recognised as the active agents in the development of disease in animals, parasitic fungi are now regarded as the chief cause of disease in plants. Wet rot in the potato, rot in the bulbs of the hyacinth and the onion, gummosis in the tomato, yellows in the peach, and pink decay in wheat may be cited as the principal diseases of plants at present ascertained to be caused by bacteria.
Parasitic fungi are extremely numerous, and are as varied in their action and peculiar in the parts they affect as they are numerous. Some attack the roots, others the stem and branches, while the flowers and even the several organs of reproduction and the fruit are each liable to be attacked by some particular parasite which induces disease. They are almost always local in their action, and it is very rare to find a case in which the whole organism of a plant is affected in the sense that man and other animals are said to be constitutionally diseased. Instances there are in varieties of cultivated plants of something extremely like constitutional proneness to disease. Certain varieties of peas and of wheat are extremely liable to mildew, and to become abortive or die of the affection. But such extreme cases are regarded as evidence rather of local or temporary conditions being favourable to an overwhelming distribution of the parasite and the consequent multiplication of the lesions than of the permeation of disease which takes place in the organism of animals on the introduction of a microbe into the blood.
Nor is heredity so generally recognised as a factor in predisposing plants to disease as it is ascertained to be in animals. The tendency already alluded to in some varieties of peas and wheat, and a similar tendency to canker in some varieties of the apple, and the greater liability of certain varieties of the potato to succumb to disease than others, would indeed appear to be attributable to hereditary predisposition in the individual kinds. But it is generally conceded that such peculiarities are indications only of constitutional weakness in the variety, not of any hereditary proneness to disease.
In the suddenness of outbreak and the rapidity with which they spread when they first appear in a country or locality, there is a strong resemblance in some plant diseases to certain epidemics in animals. And this resemblance is carried further in tracing the subsequent history of notable plant diseases. They appear, like epidemics in animals, to exhaust their extreme virulence after a time. The cases of attack may continue numerous and frequent, but the type is less severe, the disease wears itself out. The potato disease of 1845 has continued annually in greater or less severity since that time; but from that year, and the two or three years immediately succeeding, it has ceased to be so formidable. Other instances might be mentioned in illustration of this resemblance of remarkable plant diseases to epidemics among animals—the vine disease (Oidium), the hollyhock disease (Puccinia malvacearum), the celery disease (P. Apii), all of which made their appearance suddenly with such virulence and widespread rapidity as to threaten extinction of the species attacked, but are now sources of neither trouble nor alarm.
The direct action of parasitic fungi in causing disease in plants is through the mycelium or spawn injuring the host plants either by depriving them of nourishment, by impairing their power of assimilation, or by abnormally accelerating or retarding growth. The extent of injury inflicted is extremely variable, in some cases exterminating in degree, and in others, though widespread and general, having little ill effect upon the health of the subjects. Adverse external circumstances—such as unsuitable temperature, excess of dryness or moisture in the air and in the soil, deficiency of light, the presence of deleterious elements in the soil or of noxious gases in the atmosphere—by debilitating the plants render them more liable to attacks of fungi, and aggravate their severity.
The effects of disease in plants are extremely various. One of the most common manifestations of the presence of parasitic fungi in the tissues is hypertrophy in the parts affected. This may be either local or general; the roots, the stems, the leaves are all liable to this peculiar disorder. Many of the conifers are particularly subject to hypertrophies in disease. The so-called Cedar-apples of the United States, which occur in great abundance on the branches of Juniperus virginiana, are caused by the spawn of Gymnosporangium macropus. They are reniform tumours, and, as has been pointed out by Professor Farlow, originate by the mycelium entering a leaf and growing downwards into the bark of the smaller branches. Its presence acts as a source of irritation to the cells. The stem and branches of Juniperus communis are subject to hypertrophies caused by the spawn of G. claviariaforme. This is frequently to be observed in Britain, and the enlargements are of a very persistent character, and in effect impede the supply of sap to the branches beyond them. Similar tumours occur on the branches of the silver fir, which are caused by the spawn of Peridermium elatinum. But the most remarkable example of hypertrophy in connection with the diseases of any of the conifers is that which occurs in the larch disease, which is caused by the spawn of Peziza calycina. The presence of the spawn threads in the cortex, cambium, and woody tissues causes their death; but hypertrophy of the tissues of the surrounding parts is set up. The death and fissuring of the bark of the affected parts follows in due course, and the branch attacked eventually dies, and sooner or later also the tree succumbs to the disease. There are many other examples of this form of plant disease, nor are they peculiar to ligneous plants, but occur in humble herbaceous subjects, such as the violet, garden and other species of anemone, ranunculus, and even in grasses; but space will not permit of more extended notice of particular cases.
‘Finger-and-toe,’ ‘Anbury,’ and ‘Club-root’ are the common names given to a disease which attacks the turnip, cabbage, cauliflower, and other members of the important natural order of Cruciferae. It assumes the form of tumours on the roots gener- ally, but they also appear on the bulb of the turnip. They increase in number and in size as the plants grow, but eventually the plants cease to develop and die; the tumours becoming fetid masses, and leaving the spores of the fungus (Plasmodiophora brassicæ) in the soil.
Diseases of plants of traumatic origin are those which result as a consequence of wounds which may have been received by a tree or shrub. Nature may have succeeded in covering over the wound, and superficially all may appear well; but it often occurs that some fungus, perhaps harmless to the subject while its bark is intact, finds a lodgment in the wound, and sets up parasitic disease.
Canker, though most familiar to us upon the apple-tree, is not uncommon upon such trees as the oak, ash, elm, beech, &c. It is caused by the same fungus (Nectria distissima) in every case. Gummosis, which is similar to canker, is caused by Gleospora gummifera, which occurs in several forms. This destructive disease, it has been suggested, was caused by bacteria, but Beyrinck has conclusively settled the point by inoculative experiments. It is quite innocuous when inoculated into other trees, such as the apple, pear, oak, and maple.
Some parasitic fungi cause disease and death by fastening on the woody tissues of trees and shrubs when these are exposed by reason of wounds and bruises of the bark. The spawn penetrates gradually to the core of even the largest trees, and effects their decay and death. Unlike the microscopic species which induce disease by penetrating the herbaceous parts of plants, these wound parasites are mostly large conspicuous fungi. Examples are to be found on the ash and the elm in Polyporus squamosus, and in two species of Agaricus, A. ulmarinus and A. adiposus, the latter attacking wounded ash and beech trees, and the former wounded elm-trees, while A. ostreatus attacks injured laburnums.
Rot or gangrene in the stems of fir-trees is caused by A. melleus, the mycelium of which finds its way into the woody tissues by the roots and gradually ascends the trunk, inducing decay either in the form of moist or dry rot.
Atrophy occurs in the pine, in wheat, and in other plants in consequence of attacks of various minute parasitic fungi. Uredo pinitorum attacks the pine tribe, and by arresting the flow of sap at the points attacked starves the branches beyond, causing sterility and eventually death. In like manner Puccinia graminis attacks the straw of wheat, and renders the ear abortive. But sterility is also caused by parasitic fungi attacking the organs of reproduction directly. Certain species attack the male organs only, as Ustilago violacea, some, such as Thecaphora hyalina, affect only the female organs, while Ustilago carbo effects the destruction of all the floral organs.
A singular feature in the economy of many of the minute parasitic fungi is that in one stage of their existence they are capable of living only on one kind of host plant, and at another stage on a species quite distinct; so distinct indeed, as in the case of the Puccinia above named, that in one form it attacks the barberry and in another stage wheat. It has long been a matter of common observation among farmers in Britain, on the continent of Europe, and in parts of the United States, where the common barberry has been introduced, that the proximity of that shrub to wheat-fields had some mysterious connection with mildew in wheat. In the state of Massachusetts a law was passed in 1760 enjoining the extirpation of the shrub, in consequence of the belief that it caused or at least intensified the wheat disease. The problem was solved by the late Professor De Bary in 1864, who, by placing the promycelial spores of the Puccinia (wheat-mildew) on the barberry produced Ecidium berberidis, the mildew which frequently attacks that shrub. Since that time De Bary, Hartig, Plowright, and others have demonstrated that sixty or more species of these minute parasites have this heterocismal habit, and further investigation will doubtless reveal many more.
Cures for plant diseases are as yet empirical rather than scientific. In many cases the subject affected is fatally smitten before evidence of disease is visible. Mildew, which is one of the most common phenomena of plant disease, is the fructification, the final stage, of the parasite. The mycelium, whence the mildew springs, is working its deadly function on the plant in parts which external remedial applications cannot effectively reach. In many cases of plant disease the affected subject dies without any apparent cause; investigation after death may discover it, but too often also it reveals the fact that our knowledge does not enable us to prescribe a cure. Internal remedies and the means of exhibiting them are yet undiscovered. Soot, sulphur, soap are safe external remedies for mildew—that is, they destroy the pest without injuring the foliage on which it preys—but do not always eradicate the disease. London Purple and Paris Green, both having copper for their base, are very effectual external remedies, but require to be used with great caution, as they are dangerous to plant-life. There are many other preparations and compounds obtainable which are more or less effectual in destroying parasitic fungi, but the only safeguard against attack appears to be the maintenance of the plant in perfect health. By intelligent culture—that is, by surrounding the plant with those conditions of soil and atmosphere essential to its healthy existence—disease may be prevented, except it is epidemic or all-pervading, as in the case of the potato disease.
There are separate articles in this work on plant-diseases at ANBURY, ERGOT, RAPHANIA, RUST, SMUT, and under the names of the plants affected—e.g. POTATO; and on the various insect-pests which induce diseased conditions, such as the Aphides and Phylloxera. See also PARASITIC PLANTS; Sorauer, Handbuch der Pflanzenkrankheiten (2d ed. 1886); Frank, Die Krankheiten der Pflanzen (1880); Hartig, Lehrbuch der Baumkrankheiten (1882); Coste, Phytotomie Pathologique (1877); J. Paget, Elemental Pathology (1880); Professor H. Marshall Ward, The Diseases of Plants (1889); and Professor Plowright in the Gardeners' Chronicle for 1891.
PLANT-LORE. Apart altogether from the more or less vague and valueless symbolism, direct or indirect, understood as the Language of Flowers (q.v.), there is an abundant store of traditional lore associated with all kinds of trees, plants, and flowers. The study of this throws much light on many puzzling survivals in popular folklore, and Mannhardt (1831-80) and Mr J. G. Frazer have shown its importance for part of the problem of primitive religion. It is not infrequent among Australians and Red Indians to find the Totem (q.v.) taking the form of a plant or tree, and for these the individual shows his reverence by refusing to gather or destroy them. We find the worship of trees widely prevalent among savages everywhere, and we have ample evidence that it was an important element in the religion of all the families of the Aryan stock. Grimm thinks the oldest sanctuaries of the Germans were natural woods, and hints at a historical connection between the ancient sacred inviolate wood and the later royal forest—a ludicrous descent from the god to the game-preserver. The oak-worship of the ancient Druids, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus in the centre of Rome, the Ficus religiosa of India, and the sacred groves of the Semitic and pre-Semitic races still surviving at Carthage a century after Augustine are ready examples of tree-worship from sufficiently wide centres of civilisation. The primitive mind of the savage readily conceives of a tree as animated by a conscious soul cognate with his own, and he may regard the tree either as its permanent outward organism or merely its characteristic dwelling-place. Hence trees have their place in the doctrine of fetichism, of idolatry, and the upward development of religion. Buddhists do not include trees among sentient beings possessing mind, but recognise the existence of the genius of the tree, and Buddha himself was such as often as forty-three times during his transmigrations. The reverence paid to the famous Bo-tree (q.v.) shows how fundamental a fact is tree-worship, which undoubtedly formed a large part of the old indigenous religion amalgamated by the new philosophical faith. But none the less are the sacred tree and grove to be found within the range of Semitic and Aryan influences, and the obstinate revival, even under the shadow of purer rites, of the Canaanitish Ashera worship proves how deeply they were rooted in the old religion of the land. From all sides we find evidence at once of the great antiquity and uniformity of the worship of trees, whether for the services they render to man, for their venerable antiquity, their form, for particular qualities ascribed to them as containing the seeds of fire, for their situation, as on sombre and lonely mountain-tops, or for their association with certain phenomena, as plagues and pestilences, or certain events in the history of the homestead. In the growth, life, decay, and death of the plant the primitive man easily sees an analogue to his own life-history, and herein we may find the philosophy of the widespread rustic rites associated with marriage and with the birth of children. The custom of scattering flowers and the fruits of the field over the footsteps of a newly-married pair conveys an obvious reference to the belief in the reproductive powers of vegetation and to the fundamental postulate of all sympathetic magic that any effect may be produced by imitating it. Primitive ideas of the fertilising and fruit-bearing powers of nature led easily, according to Mannhardt, to the belief that each tree or plant possesses spiritual as well as physical life, being tenanted either by semi-divine spirits or by the ghosts of the dead; and a natural generalisation of this notion made plants and trees collectively the abode of particular inhabitants—an example of animism developing into polytheism. A forest-god has been deduced from a mere tree-soul, both alike regarded as powerful to produce rain or sunshine, to cause fruits to spring and cattle to easily bring forth their young. A still higher generalisation gave a belief in a genius of plant-life or forest-life, or, higher still, a genius of growth or fertility in general. This universal genius of growth was symbolised by a bush or tree, brought in triumph from the forest, gaily decked, and solemnly planted near the homestead or in the village. We have thus seen both the spirit incorporate in the tree, suffering and dying with it, and the tree considered as the mere dwelling-place of the god; but still further in many cases we find the tree-spirit regarded as detached from the tree, and, through a confusion of his vegetable and anthropomorphic representations, clothed in human form as a man or a girl decked with flowers—the May King, Queen of the May, the Old Woman or Corn-mother of German harvest-fields, the Jack in the Green of young London sweeps, and the like. The existence of those Corn-spirits which especially haunted and protected the waving corn we see dimly recognised in characteristic ceremonies of an English harvest-home, and in the German custom of leaving the last sheaf of rye in the field as a tribute to the Roggenwulf. The French and German custom of the Harvest May, in which a branch or tree decked with ears of corn is carried home in the last wagon from the harvest-field and hung on the roof of the farmhouse till next year, is closely cognate with the eiresone of ancient Greece, and suggests a parallel with some of our own old harvest customs.
Sympathetic affinities between plant and animal life strongly impress the primitive imagination; we find them playing an important part in many cosmogonies, as in the Iranian account of how the first human pair grew up as a single tree, the fingers or twigs of each one folded over the other's ears, till the time came when they were separated, and infused by Ahuramazda with distinct human souls. Other mythical cosmogonic trees that need only be named are the heavenly fig-tree of the Vedas, and the ash-tree Yggdrasil of Norse mythology. In some places trees are informed when their owner dies, and an apology formally made to them by the woodcutter before he fells them; and every one is familiar with the custom of planting a tree at the birth of a child, and the notion of a sympathetic relation subsisting throughout life betwixt the two. The trees planted by Queen Victoria on her visit to an English town, and the Trees of Liberty planted to mark a new political régime, convey unconsciously a survival of the same sympathetic symbolism. The belief that a child's rickets can be cured by passing him through a cleft ash-tree still lingers obstinately in corners of England, and stories of trees giving forth human groans and exuding human blood are common in folk-tales everywhere. Even so late as 1870, in Oxfordshire, a gypsy woman told how Fair Rosamond was changed into a 'Holy Briar,' which bleeds if one plucks a twig. Families, as well as individuals, have tutelary or guardian trees, and Hytén-Cavallius, for example, tells us that the three families of Linnæus (or Linné), Lindelius, and Tiliander were all called after the same tree, an ancient linden or lime which grew at Jonsboda Lindergord. When the Lindelius family died out one of the old lime's chief boughs withered; after the death of the daughter of the great Linnæus the second main bough fittingly bore leaves no more; and when the last of the Tiliander family expired the tree's active life came to an end, though the dead trunk still exists and is highly honoured.
We see then how natural is the notion of symbolising the genius of vegetation under the form of a tree, and thus, as has been shown, we find some hint at the real philosophy underlying the joyous old-world May-day usages, the Maypole decked with streamers, round which young men and maidens danced in chorus, and not less the high ceremonies attending the harvest-home. Even our Christmas-tree, which originally made its way into England and France principally through the influence of Prince Albert and the Duchess Helen of Orleans, is really nothing but a survival of an ancient German custom of heathen origin, and we may safely disregard the foolish theory of its being Christian because the 24th of December chances to be consecrated to Adam and Eve. One legend relates how Adam brought from Paradise a fruit or slip from the Tree of Knowledge, from which sprang the tree from which the Cross was made—an example of a process of myth-making after the fact to which we owe not a few beliefs and customs not understood. But many plants have received a kind of religious consecration from the name of some saint whose festival fell on the day on which they were gathered. And Christianity, like Buddhism, early showed a marvellous adaptability in the way in which it adopted popular rites of an earlier religion, and subtly rebaptised them as its own. Many remnants of primitive superstitions survive in the local English names of plants and flowers, chiefly in connection with the fairies, the devil, the Virgin, and the Cross, and we have a great wealth of association from one cause or other between saints and flowers, as St Agnes with the Christmas rose, St Joseph of Arimatheia with the Glastonbury thorn, St Patrick with the shamrock, the Virgin with the white lily, just as Thor had his oak-tree, Venus her myrtle, the Indians the lotus, and the Druids the mistletoe. Again, historical personages and families are frequently associated with particular flowers—it is enough merely to name the orange-lily, the red and white roses, the fleur-de-lis, the planta genista, and the violet. Family and clan crests frequently take this form, as the fir, holly, juniper; also national badges, as the rose, thistle, shamrock. More curious and interesting, although obscure, are the notions of magical properties connected as persistently with some plants as medicinal properties are with others. Most prominent in European folklore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain-ash; but strange properties are still ascribed to the rosemary, vervain, St John's wort, mandrake, asphodel, and to fern-seed; and many flowers lend themselves through some obscure inherent fitness to special methods of divination. The doctrine of Signatures (q.v.), of such importance in the history of medicine, opens up a special chapter of sympathetic magic, involving the belief that plants bore by nature marks indicating plainly for what diseases they were medicinally useful. The trees of Paradise, of Chaldæan and other cosmogonies, the orauclear oaks of Dodona, those trees of healing spiritually allegorised in the Apocalypse, the trees of Liberty of the French Revolution, and the trees round which an Indian bride and bridegroom walk hand in hand, point as unmistakably to a real sympathetic affinity between the human and the vegetable world as did the Dryads, Fauns, and Satyrs of the ancient Hellenic mythology, with their analogues our own elves and fairies of the woods, the transformation-myths, the Orpheus whose lyre laid its charm on beasts and trees alike, or the Pan at the report of whose death all nature mourned aloud.
See W. Mannhardt, Roggenwulf und Roggenhund (Danzig, 1865), Die Korndämonen (Berl. 1868), Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme (Berl. 1875), Antike Wald- und Feldkulte (Berl. 1877), and the posthumous Mythologische Forschungen (Strassb. 1884); A. de Gubernatis, La Mythologie des Plantes (2 vols. Paris, 1878-82); M. von Strantz, Die Blumen in Sage und Geschichte (Berl. 1875); H. Pfannen-schmid, Germanische Erntefeste im heidn. u. Christl. Cultus (Hanover, 1878); Rev. Hilderic Friend, Flowers and Flower-lore (1884); V. Jahn, Die Deutschen Opfergebräuche bei Ackerbau und Viehzucht (Breslau, 1884); and J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (2 vols. 1890). The last work contains a distinct contribution of the greatest value to a scientific knowledge of the worship of vegetation, but it seems probable that a serviceable enough theory has been carried too far, and at any rate many of its conclusions remain to be tested by the fresh generalisations of a later day. Its starting-point is the mysterious story of the Arician lake, well known through Turner's picture and the allusion in Macaulay's Lay of the Battle of Lake Regillus. The lake occupies the site of the ancient sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis. In its grove grew a sacred tree, from which whoever succeeded in breaking off 'the Golden Bough' had the right to challenge the priest of the sanctuary to single combat, and, if victorious, to reign in his stead. Mr Frazer sees here an incarnation of the spirit of the tree, which passed continuously on his being killed into a new and more vigorous incarnation. He finds it also an evidence of primitive human sacrifice, and identifies the Golden Bough with the mistletoe growing on the oak—the only thing in nature which could bring Balder to his doom. He has with unequalled learning and ingenuity traced many cognate customs in classical antiquity, as well as parallels in our modern rustic spring and midsummer customs, and finds the same significance of the death and resurrection of vegetation under the various forms of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Syrian Astarte and Adonis, the Phrygian Cybele and Attis, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris.