The root is great and bulbous, covered with a blackish skin on the outside, and white within, and of the bigness of a great onion. So much for the question in its matter-of-fact aspect. We may now look at it from its fabulous side. And first, it is to be remembered that moly was not a charm, but a counter-charm. Its powers were defensive, and presupposed an attack. It was as a shield against the thrust of a spear. Now if any clear notion could be attained regarding the kind of weapon of which it had efficacy thus to blunt the point, we should be perceptibly nearer to its individualisation. But we are only told that the magic draught of Circe, the effects of which it had power to neutralise, contained pernicious drugs. The poet either did not know, or did not care to tell more. There is, however, a plant round which a crowd of strange beliefs gathered from the earliest times. This is the _Atropa mandragora_, or mandrake, probably identical with the _Dudaim_ of Scripture, and called by classical writers _Circæa_, from its supposed potency in philtres. The rude resemblance of its bifurcated root to the lower half of the human frame started its career as an object of credulity and an instrument of imposture. It was held to be animated with a life transcending the obscure vitality of ordinary vegetable existence, and occult powers of the most remarkable kind were attributed to it. The little images, formed of the mandrake root, consulted as oracles in Germany under the name of _Alrunen_, and imported with great commercial success into this country during the reign of Henry VIII., were credited with the power of multiplying money left in their charge, and generally of bringing luck to their possessors, especially when their original seat had been at the foot of a gallows, and their first vesture a fragment of a winding-sheet. But privilege, as usual, was here also fraught with peril. The operation of uprooting a mandrake was a critical one, formidable consequences ensuing upon its clumsy or negligent execution. These could only be averted by a strict observance of forms prescribed by the wisdom of a very high antiquity. According to Pliny, three circles were to be drawn round the plant with a sword, within which the digger stood, facing west. This position had to be combined, as best it might, with an approach from the windward side, upon his formidable prey. Through the pages of Josephus the device gained its earliest publicity, of employing a dog to receive the death penalty, attendant, in his belief, on eradication. It was widely adopted, and by mediæval sagacity fortified with the additional prescriptions that the canine victim should be black without a white hair, that the deed should be done before dawn on a Friday, and that the ears of the doer should be carefully stuffed with cotton-wool. For, at the instant of leaving its parent-earth, a fearful sound, which no mortal might hear and sanely