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In the curious work of Chrysostom Magnenus, we meet with a whimsical account of the Signature of Tobacco. “In the first place,” says he, “the manner in which the flowers adhere to the head of the plant indicates the Infundibulum Cerebri, and Pituitary Gland. In the next place, the three membranes of which its leaves are composed announce their value to the stomach which has three membranes.”^[50]

The blood-stone, the Heliotropium of the ancients, from the occasional small specks or points of a blood red colour exhibited on its green surface, is even at this day employed in many parts of England and Scotland, to stop a bleeding from the nose; and nettle-tea continues a popular remedy for the cure of Urticaria. It is also asserted that some substances bear the Signatures of the humours, as the petals of the red rose that of the blood, and the roots of rhubarb and the flowers of saffron, that of the bile.^[51]

I apprehend that John of Gaddesden, in the fourteenth century, celebrated by Chaucer, must have been directed by some remote analogy of this kind, when he ordered the son of Edward the First, who was dangerously ill with the small-pox, to be wrapped in scarlet cloth, as well as all those who attended upon him, or came into his presence, and even the bed and room in which he was laid were covered with the same drapery; and so completely did it answer, say the credulous historians of that day, that the Prince was cured without having so much as a single mark left upon him.