The romance of the Apothecaries' garden at Chelsea / by F. Dawtrey Drewitt.

Drewitt, F. Dawtrey (Frederic Dawtrey), 1848-1942.

Date:: 1924

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The romance of the Apothecaries' garden at Chelsea / by F. Dawtrey Drewitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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pain, had to learn by hard experience that, although the blackberries which grew on the prickly bushes were good eating, the smooth, black berries of the deadly nightshade would kill him—although the rabbits nibbled its leaves without hurt. The lowTer animals had taught him much—they had learnt their lesson before him—but their teaching was by no means infallible. He had to discover that the roots and leaves of wild cabbage were wholesome, but that the roots of the monkshood, close by, would stop his breath—that the tempting fruit, like an orange lying on the thirsty desert sand, which his descendants would some day call 4 4 bitter apple,” was poisonous, although he had seen the wild rock pigeons peck it, and had found the seed in their crops.1 He had to learn that he might eat the luscious red berries on the Yew tree, for which the missel-thrushes scrambled in the autumn—but not its green seeds or fresh twigs—that grass seed2 was wholesome, and that, just as the wild ox ground it with its great teeth, he could grind it between stones into meal. And so the cave man became, of necessity, a field botanist—a better one than many a modern Londoner. Time went on. The medicine-men made drawings of herbs on clean calf-skins, to show irrhe writer found seeds of Colocynth in the crop of a Rock Dove shot in South Algeria. 2Wheat, barley, and oats have been so long cultivated, that it is difficult to trace the wild grasses from which they came. De Candolle (Origin of Cultivated Plants) believes that wild wheat exists in Mesopotamia. The wild ancestors of oats and common barley are said to be found in Western Asia.