robability is that the two
names meant one and the same plant, for the characteristics are too
peculiar to be alike possessed by different species. If the moly were
not mandragoras there is nothing else known to modern botany that it
could be, unless it were rue, with which some scholars have sought to
identify it, but not very successfully.

The learned author of Pseudosia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, at any
rate, was clearly of opinion that moly and mandragoras were one and the
same. He quotes also from Pliny that the ancient way of pulling the root
was to get on the windward side of the plant, and with a sword to
describe three circles about it, whilst the operator kept his face
turned to the west. The dangers attending the plucking of mandrakes are
shrewdly disposed of by Sir Thomas Browne with the remark that it is
'derogatory unto the Providence of God ... to impose so destructive a
quality on any plant ... whose parts are usefull unto many.' The same
author mentions the superstition that the mandrake grows under gallows,
fructified by the decaying bodies of criminals, that it grows both male
and female, and that it shrieks upon eradication. This last idea he
derides as 'false below confute, arising perhaps from a small and
stridulous noise which, being firmly rooted, it maketh upon divulsion of
parts.' 'A slender foundation,' he remarks, 'for such a vast conception;
for such a noise we sometimes observe in other plants--in parsnips,
liquorish, eringium, flags, and others.'

The belief that the root of the mandrake resembles the human figure is
characterized by the writer last quoted, as a 'conceit not to be made
out by ordinary inspection, or any other eyes than such as regarding the
clouds behold them in shapes conformable to pre-apprehensions.' It is
traceable to the bifurcation of the root; a formation, however, which
is frequently found 'in carrots, parsnips, briony, and many others.'
There is no other importance, therefore, to be attached to 'the epithet
of Pythagoras, who calls it anthropomorphon, and that of Columella, who
terms it semihomo;' nor to Albertus, 'when he affirmed that mandrakes
represent mankind with the distinction of either sex.' The roots, which
were commonly sold in various parts of Europe 'unto ignorant people,
handsomely made out the shape of man or woman. But these are not
productions of nature but contrivances of art, as divers have noted....
This is vain and fabulous, which ignorant