y and rue' were employed to purge and purify mortal eyes.
Pliny is very learned about the magical virtues of rue. Just as the
stolen potato is sovereign for rheumatism, so 'rue stolen thriveth the
best.' The Samoans think that their most valued vegetables were stolen
from heaven by a Samoan visitor.[167] It is remarkable that rue,
according to Pliny, is killed by the touch of a woman in the same way
as, according to Josephus, the mandrake is tamed.[168] These passages
prove that the classical peoples had the same extraordinary
superstitions about women as the Bushmen and Red Indians. Indeed
Pliny[169] describes a magical manner of defending the crops from
blight, by aid of women, which is actually practised in America by the
Red Men.[170]

Here, then, are proofs enough that rue was magical outside of
Cappadocia. But this is not an argument on Mr. Brown's lines. The
Cappadocians called rue 'moly'; what language, he asks, was spoken by
the Cappadocians? Prof. Sayce (who knows so many tongues) says that
'we know next to nothing of the language of the Cappadocians, or of
the Moschi who lived in the same locality.' But where Prof. Sayce is,
the Hittites, if we may say so respectfully, are not very far off. In
this case he thinks the Moschi (though he admits we know next to
nothing about it) 'seem to have spoken a language allied to that of
the Cappadocians and Hittites.' That is to say, it is not impossible
that the language of the Moschi, about which next to nothing is known,
may have been allied to that of the Cappadocians, about which we know
next to nothing. All that we do know in this case is, that four
hundred years after Christ the dwellers in Cappadocia employed a word
'moly,' which had been Greek for at least twelve hundred years. But
Mr. Brown goes on to quote that one of the languages of which we know
next to nothing, Hittite, was 'probably allied to Proto-Armenian, and
perhaps Lykian, and was above all not Semitic.' In any case 'the
cuneiform mode of writing was used in Cappadocia at an early period.'
As even Professor Sayce declines to give more than a tentative reading
of a Cappadocian cuneiform inscription, it seems highly rash to seek
in this direction for an interpretation of a Homeric word 'moly,' used
in Cappadocia very many centuries after the tablets were scratched.
But, on the evidence of the Babylonian character of the cuneiform
writing on Cappadocian tablets, Mr. Brown establishes a connection
betwee