Sabbath-breaking or with the theft, the culprit loudly protested his innocence, and at length exclaimed: "If I have committed this crime, may I be sent to the Moon!" After his death this fate duly befell him, and there he remains to this day. The Black Forest peasants relate that a certain man stole a bundle of wood on Sunday because he thought on that day he should be unmolested by the foresters. However, on leaving the forest, he met a stranger, who was no other than the Almighty himself. After reproving the thief for not keeping the Sabbath-day holy, God said he must be punished, but he might choose whether he would be banished to the Sun or to the Moon. The man chose the latter, declaring he would rather freeze in the Moon than burn in the Sun; and so the Broom-man came into the Moon with his faggot on his back. At Hemer, in Westphalia, the legend runs that a man was engaged in fencing his garden on Good Friday, and had just poised a bundle of Thorns on his fork when he was at once transported to the Moon. Some of the Hemer peasants, however, declare that the Moon is not only inhabited by a man with a Thorn-bush and pitchfork, but also by his wife, who is churning, and was exiled to the Moon for using a churn on Sunday. According to other traditions, the figure in the Moon is that of Isaac bearing the faggot on his shoulders for his own sacrifice on Mount Moriah; or Cain with a bundle of Briars; or a tipsy man who for his audacity in threatening the Moon with a Bramble he held in his hand, was drawn up to this planet, and has remained there to the present day.

HE antiquity of floral emblems probably dates from the time when the human heart first beat with the gentle emotions of affection or throbbed with the wild pulsations of love. Then it was that man sought to express through the instrumentality of flowers his love of purity and beauty, or to typify through their aid the ardour of his passionate desires; for the symbolism of flowers, it has been conjectured, was first conceived as a parable speaking to the eye and thence teaching the heart.

Driven, in his struggle for existence, to learn the properties of plants in order to obtain wholesome food, man found that with the beauty of their form and colour they spoke lovingly to him. They could be touched, tasted, handled, planted, sown, and reaped they were useful, easily converted into simple articles of clothing, or bent, twisted, and cut into weapons and tools. Flowers became a language to man very early, and according to their poisonous, soothing, or nutritious qualities, or on account of some peculiarities in their growth or shape which seemed to tell upon the mysteries of life, birth, and death, he gave them names which thenceforth became words and symbols to him of these phenomena.

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Glimpses of the ancient poetical plant symbolism have been found amid the ruins of temples, graven on the sides of rocks, and inscribed on the walls of mighty caves where the early nations of India, Assyria, Chaldæa, and Egypt knelt in adoration. Chinese from time immemorial have known a comprehensive system of floral signs and emblems, and the Japanese have ever possessed a mode of communicating by symbolic flowers. Persian literature abounds in chaste and poetical allegories, which demonstrate the antiquity of floral symbolism in that far Eastern land: thus we are told that Sadi the poet, when a slave, presented to his tyrant master a Rose accompanied with this pathetic appeal :— Do good to thy servant whilst thou hast the power, for the season of power is often as transient as the duration of this beautiful

flower." The beauty of the symbol melted the heart of his lord, and the slave obtained his liberty.

The Hindu racs are passionately fond of flowers, and their ancient Sanscrit books and poems are full of allusions to their beauty and symbolic character. With them, the flower of the field is venerated as a symbol of fecundity. In their mythology, at the beginning of all things there appeared in the waters the expanded Lotus-blossom, the emblematic flower of life and light; the Sun, Moon, and Stars are flowers in the celestial garden; the Sun's ray is a full-blown Rose, which springs from the waters and feeds the sacrificial fire; the Lightning is a garland of flowers thrown by Narada. Pushpa (flower), or Pushpaka (flowery), is the epithet applied to the luminous car of the god Kuvera, which was seized by Râvana, the royal monster of Lankâ, and recaptured by the demi-god Râma, the incarnation of Vishnu. The bow of Kâma, the Indian Cupid, darts forth flowers in the guise of arrows. The Indian poetic lover gathers from the flowers a great number of chaste and beautiful symbols. The following description of a young maiden struck down by illness is a fair example of this :"All of a sudden the blighting glance of unpropitious fortune having fallen on that Rose-cheeked Cypress, she laid her head on the pillow of sickness; and in the flower-garden of her beauty, in place of the Damask Rose, sprang up the branch of the Saffron. Her fresh Jasmine, from the violence of the burning illness, lost its moisture, and her Hyacinth, full of curls, lost all its endurance from the fever that consumed her."

It was with the classic Greeks, however, that floral symbolism reached its zenith: not only did the Hellenic race entertain an extraordinary passion for flowers, but with consummate skill they devised a code of floral types and emblems adapted to all phases of public and private life. As Loudon writes, when speaking of the emblematic use made by the Greeks of flowers :-"Not only were they then, as now, the ornament of a beauty, and of the altars of the gods, but the youths crowned themselves with them in the fêtes, the priests in religious ceremonies, and the guests in convivial meetings. Garlands of flowers were suspended from the gates of the city in the times of rejoicing . . the philosophers wore crowns of flowers, and the warriors ornamented their foreheads with them in times of triumph." The Romans, although they adopted most of the floral symbolic lore of their Hellenic predecessors, and in the case of emblematic garlands were particularly refined, were still evidently not so passionately fond of floral symbolism as were the Greeks; and with the decadence of the Empire, the attractive art gradually fell into oblivion.

The science of plant symbolism may, if we accept the views of Miss Marshall, a writer on the subject,* be classified into five

* Plant Symbolism,' in ‘Natural History Notes,' Vol. II.

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divisions. These are, firstly, plants which are symbols, pure and simple, of the Great Unknown God, or Heaven Father; and embrace those, the form, colour, or other peculiarities of which led the priests, the early thinkers to the community, the medicine-men, magicians, and others, to associate them with ideas of the fardistant, unknown, incomprehensible, and overwhelming the destructive forces of Nature. Such plants were used as hieroglyphics for these ideas, and became symbols of the Deity or Supreme Power. To these visible symbols belong plants such as the Lily, Onion, flowers of heavenly blue colour (symbolising the blue sky), and leaves threefold or triangular, symbolising God the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.

Secondly, the plants symbolising or suggesting portions or organs of the human body, internal and external, which to the earliest of mankind, and certainly to the Egyptian embalmers, were organs of mystery and importance; such is the heart, the first to beat in the foetal, and the last to cease pulsating in the adult organism, &c. To this section belong heart-shaped leaves and petals; and where, as in the Shamrock, there is united the threefold emblem and the heart-shaped leaf, there is a doubly sacred idea united with the form. To this section belong also plants and fruits such as the Fig, Pomegranate, &c.

The third section comprises plants that were consecrated or set apart as secret and sacred, because those who possessed the knowledge of their powers made use of them to awe the ignorant people of their race. These plants were supposed to be under the control of the good or evil powers. They were the narcotics, the stupefying or the exciting vegetable drugs. The sacred incense in all temples was compounded of these, and their use has been, and still is, common to all countries; and as some of these compounds produced extraordinary or deadly effects, as the very dust of the burnt incense, when mixed with water, and drunk, brought on a violent and agonising death, while the fumes might merely produce delightful and enticing ecstacy, making men and women eloquent and seemingly inspired, the knowledge was wisely kept secret from the people, and severe penalties-sometimes even death-awaited those who illegally imitated, compounded, or used these drugs. To this section belong the plants used to make the Chinese and Japanese joss, as well as Opium, Tobacco, Stramonium, and various opiates now well known.

The fourth section comprises those plants which in all countries have been observed to bear some resemblance to parts of the human body. Such plants were valued and utilised as heavensent guides in the treatment of the ills flesh is heir to; and they are the herbs whose popular names among the inhabitants of every land have become " familiar in their mouths as household words." To such belong the Birth-wort, Kidney-wort, Lung

wort, Liver-wort, Pile-wort, Nit-grass, Tooth-cress, Heart-clover, and many others known to the ancient herbalists. It was their endeavours to find out whether or no the curious forms, spots, and markings of such plants really indicated their curative powers, that led to the properties of other herbs being discovered, and a suggestive nomenclature being adopted for them, such as is found in the names Eyebright, Flea-bane, Canker-weed, Hunger - grass, Stone-break, &c.

Lastly, in the fifth section of symbolical plants we come to those which point to a time when symbols were expressed by letters, such as appear on the Martagon Lily-the true poetical Hyacinth of the Greeks-on the petals of which are traced the woeful AI, AI,-the expression of the grief of Phoebus at the death of the fair Adonis.

"In the flower he weaved

The sad impression of his sighs; which bears
Ai, Ai, displayed in funeral characters."

In this section also are included plants which exhibit in some portion of their structure typical markings, such as the Astragalus, which in its root depicts the stars; the Banana, whose fruit, when cut, exhibits a representation of the Holy Cross; and the Bracken Fern, whose stem, when sliced, exhibits traces of letters which are sometimes used for the purposes of love divination. In Ireland, however, the Pteris aquilina is called the Fern of God, because the people imagine that if the stem be cut into three sections, on the first of these sections will be seen the letter G, on the second O, and on the third D-forming the sacred word God.

In the science of plant symbols, not only the names, but the forms, perfumes, and properties of plants have to be considered, as well as the numerical arrangements of their parts. Thus of all sacred symbolical plants, those consisting of petals or calyx-sepals, or leaves, divided into the number Five, were formerly held in peculiar reverence, because among the races of antiquity five was for ages a sacred number. The reason of this is thus explained by Bunsen :

It is well known," he says, "that the numeral one, the undivided, the eternal, is placed in antithesis to all other numerals. The figure four included the perfect ten, as 1+2+3+4=10. So four represents the All of the universe. Now if we put these together, 4+1 will be the sign of the whole God-Universe." Three is a number sacred to the most ancient as well as modern worship. Pythagoras called it the perfect number, expressive of "beginning, middle, and end," and therefore he made it a symbol of deity. Three therefore plays its rôle in plant symbology. Thus the Emblica officinalis, one of the sacred plants of India, was once the exclusive property of the priests, who kept its medicinal virtues secret: it was held in peculiar reverence because of its flowers possessing a six-parted calyx; three stamens, combined; three dichotomous styles; a fleshy fruit, tricoccous and six-seeded;