Briers, and other ditch trumpery." The fact, no doubt, is that Ferns
were considered something "uncanny and eerie;" our ancestors could not
understand a plant which seemed to them to have neither flower nor seed,
and so they boldly asserted it had neither. "This kinde of Ferne," says
Lyte in 1587, "beareth neither flowers nor sede, except we shall take
for sede the black spots growing on the backsides of the leaves, the
whiche some do gather thinking to worke wonders, but to say the trueth
it is nothing els but trumperie and superstition." A plant so strange
must needs have strange qualities, but the peculiar power attributed to
it of making persons invisible arose thus:--It was the age in which the
doctrine of signatures was fully believed in; according to which
doctrine Nature, in giving particular shapes to leaves and flowers, had
thereby plainly taught for what diseases they were specially
useful.[91:1] Thus a heart-shaped leaf was for heart disease, a
liver-shaped for the liver, a bright-eyed flower was for the eyes, a
foot-shaped flower or leaf would certainly cure the gout, and so on; and
then when they found a plant which certainly grew and increased, but of
which the organs of fructification were invisible, it was a clear
conclusion that properly used the plant would confer the gift of
invisibility. Whether the people really believed this or not we cannot
say,[92:1] but they were quite ready to believe any wonder connected
with the plant, and so it was a constant advertisement with the quacks.
Even in Addison's time "it was impossible to walk the streets without
having an advertisement thrust into your hand of a doctor who had
arrived at the knowledge of the Green and Red Dragon, and had discovered
the female Fern-seed. Nobody ever knew what this meant" ("Tatler," No.
240). But to name all the superstitions connected with the Fern would
take too much space.

The name is expressive; it is a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon _fepern_,
and so shows that some of our ancestors marked its feathery form; and
its history as a garden plant is worth a few lines. So little has it
been esteemed as a garden plant that Mr. J. Smith, the ex-Curator of the
Kew Gardens, tells us that in the year 1822 the collection of Ferns at
Kew was so extremely poor that "he could not estimate the entire Kew
collection of exotic Ferns at that period at more than forty species"
(Smith's "Ferns, British and Exotic," introduction). Since that time