The herbalist and his editor write from per-
sonal experience, and this gives them a great
advantage in dealing with superstitions. If there
was anything which people were certain about
in the early part of the seventeenth century, it
was that the mandrake only grew under a
gallows, where the dead body of a man had
fallen to pieces, and that when it was dug up it
gave a great shriek, which was fatal to the
nearest living thing. Gerard contemptuously
rejects all these and other tales as " old wives'
dreams." He and his servants have often digged
up mandrakes, and are not only still alive, but
listened in vain for the dreadful scream. It
might be supposed that such a statement, from
so eminent an authority, would settle the point,
but we find Sir Thomas Browne, in the next
generation, battling these identical popular errors
in the pages of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica,



Gerard's Herbal



75



In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence
seems to have been of no use in persuading the
public that mistletoe was not generated out of
birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs
of trees, or that its berries were not desperately
poisonous. To observe and state the truth is
not enough. The ears of those to whom it is
proclaimed must be ready to accept it.
