We shall nowhere lack for material. The plays are full of references to plants and flowers of every sort. England in Shakespeare's day, as now, was a land of bloom, and the poet but reflects the loveliness of beauty and color spread about him. But he does something more. He is not content with flashes of color and breathings of odor, he goes into detail and gives us the individual plant unmistakably. In his description he shows an exactitude, a discriminating perception that, had it been turned to Nature's problems seriously at all, must at once have transformed the science of his age. But Shakespeare was not a man of science; he was a poet. In his views of Nature he resembles the great poets of the world, notably Goethe; and, like Goethe, he not infrequently outruns the science of his time, uses his imagination, divining things invisible. Moreover, Shakespeare's plants are living things; they form a garden, not a herbarium. They stand before us in multitudes, so that it is difficult for the present purpose to know what to select. We must be content with a few specimen forms brought out in quotations no more extensive than seems necessary to the argument. Of course, there are many plants to-day discussed of which Shakespeare never heard. He does not speak of many sorts of fungi, of slime molds, microbes; he knew nothing about these. The microscope had hardly been invented, and the unseen world was as yet largely personified. And yet Shakespeare has not failed to note the visible signs of some of our microscopic forms. Critics have wasted their time and the patience of mankind in an effort to identify Hebona, the "leperous distilment" poured into the porches of the royal ear. Almost profitless are such discussions. Yet we may note that we have here to do with an effect; the means of producing it need not be too closely questioned. Before the rush of action, the weird setting, the voice of an apparition, the excited audience cares not what the mysterious vial may contain--ebony, henbane, yew, or whether it were entirely empty. What is called for is a speedy and mysterious taking off. Had the scene been laid in Italy, the effect had been reached by the fateful prick of a jeweled pin, some ring upon a Borgian finger whose pressure was the paralysis of death. But the king died of no such curari. Note the symptoms (Hamlet, i, 5, 64-73): "The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body."