Altogether, considerable romantic properties seem to be associated with this resin, but there seems to be no authentic record of the same, the only probable explanation being, that it was used and sold, like other innocent articles, by those who were supposed to have dealings in the black art, for working charms, which have thus been handed down from mediæval times. Coles states: “The early Greeks called dragon’s blood _Cinnabaris_, not knowing whether it was of vegetable or mineral origin; and that Pliny, Solinus, and Monardus have set it down for truth that it was the blood of a dragon or serpent, crushed to death by the weight of the dying elephant falling upon him; but he thinks it was certainly so called from the bloody colour that it is of, being nothing else but a mere gum”. It was used medicinally as an emmenagogue, and in the arts 300 years ago by goldsmiths and painters in glass, by the former as a base for enamel to set a foil under precious stones to give them greater lustre, and the latter by fire, to strike a crimson colour into glass for stained windows. That a belief in charms and witchcraft is still fostered by ignorant people in some parts of the country, is manifest from cases reported in the newspapers from time to time. Two practitioners of the occult sciences were haled before the magistrates but recently. One, an old crone, who confessed to using dragon’s blood in working her love charms, was rewarded with seven days with hard labour. The other, which came to light in Cornwall, was a middle-aged individual who practised as a wizard. His treatment consisted of writing an amulet to be worn near the body. Money was then required to remove the spell from the bewitched patient to some one else. To this victim was to be lent neither “cock, pin, or pan,” and by the aid of the planets the patient would be cured. But these are hard times truly for the wizard and magician, and this professor was rewarded with seven months’ incarceration in one of her Majesty’s gaols. Singular superstitious properties are attributed to certain plants. The walnut was formerly employed in medicine as an application to wounds and an antidote to poisons; and the following old riddle, says William Coles in 1657, “almost every one knows”:— “As high as a house, As little as a mouse, As round as a ball, As bitter as gall, As white as milk, As soft as silk”. There is an old tradition that the more the branches are beaten, the more prolific the fruit will be. There is a fable in Æsop of a woman who asked the walnut tree growing by the wayside, which was pelted at with stones and sticks by them that passed by, why it was so foolish as to bring forth fruit seeing that it was so beaten for its pains, to which the tree rehearsed these two proverbial verses:— “Nux, Asinus, Mulier, Simili suret lege legati, Haes tria nil recte faciunt si verbera cessent”.