n translations of the _Herbarium of
Apuleius_ and the so-called +Peri Didaxeon+.

Apart from their intrinsic fascination, there are certain
considerations which give these manuscripts a peculiar importance.
Herb lore and folk medicine lag not years, but centuries, behind the
knowledge of their own day. Within living memory our peasants were
using, and in the most remote parts of these islands they use still,
the herbal and other remedies of our Saxon ancestors. They even use
curiously similar charms. The herb lore recorded in these manuscripts
is the herb lore, not of the century in which they were written, but
of the dim past ages pictured in the oldest parts of _Widsith_ and
_Beowulf_. To the student of English plant lore, the _Herbarium of
Apuleius_ and the +Peri Didaxeon+ are less interesting because they
are translations, but the more one studies the original Saxon writings
on herbs and their uses, the more one realises that, just as in
_Beowulf_ there are suggestions and traces of an age far older than
that in which the poem was written, so in these manuscripts are
embedded beliefs which carry us back to the dawn of history. It is
this which gives this plant lore its supreme interest. It is almost
overwhelming to recognise that possibly we have here fragments of the
plant lore of our ancestors who lived when Attila's hordes were
devastating Europe, and that in the charms and ceremonies connected
with the picking and administering of herbs we are carried back to
forms of religion so ancient that, compared to it, the worship of
Woden is modern. Further, it is only in these manuscripts that we find
this herb lore, for in the whole range of Saxon literature outside
them there is remarkably little mention of plant life. The great world
of nature, it is true, is ever present; the ocean is the background of
the action in both _Beowulf_ and _Cynewulf_, and the sound of the wind
and the sea is in every line. One is conscious of vast trackless
wastes of heath and moor, of impenetrable forests and terror-infested
bogs; but of the details of plant life there is scarcely a word. In
these manuscripts alone do we find what plant life meant to our
ancestors, and, as with all primitive nations, their belief in the
mystery of herbs is almost past our civilised understanding. Their
plant lore, hoary with age, is redolent of a time when the tribes were
still wandering on the mainland of Europe, and in these first records
of this pla