The far-famed betony was long credited with marvellous medicinal properties, and hence the old saying which recommends a person when ill “to sell his coat and buy betony.”  A species of thistle was once believed to have the curious virtue of driving away melancholy, and was hence termed the “melancholy thistle.”  According to Dioscorides, “the root borne about one doth expel melancholy and remove all diseases connected therewith,” but it was to be taken in wine.

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.”

Similarly, in Brandenburg, if a person is afflicted with dizziness, he is recommended to run after sunset, naked, three times through a field of flax; after doing so, the flax will at once “take the dizziness to itself.”  A Sussex cure for ague is to eat sage leaves, fasting, nine mornings in succession; while Flemish folk-lore enjoins any one who has the ague to go early in the morning to an old willow, make three knots in one of its branches, and say “Good morrow, old one; I give thee the cold; good morrow, old one.”  A very common cure for warts is to tie as many knots on a hair as there are warts, and to throw the hair away; while an Irish charm is to give the patient nine leaves of dandelion, three leaves being eaten on three successive mornings.  Indeed, the efficacy of numbers is not confined to any one locality; and Mr. Folkard [19] mentions an instance in Cuba where, “thirteen cloves of garlic at the end of a cord, worn round the neck for thirteen days, are considered a safeguard against jaundice.”  It is necessary, however, that the wearer, in the