The seed was supposed to
be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the
Baptist was born.
We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,
_Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part I_.
In Beaumont's and Fletcher's _Fair Maid of the Inn_, is the following
allusion to the fern.
--Had you Gyges' ring,
_Or the herb that gives invisibility_.
Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:
I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
_No fern-seed in my pocket_.
Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (_Asplenium
trichomanes_) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil
influences in the Cave of Spleen.
Safe passed the gnome through this fantastic band
A branch of healing spleen-wort in his hand.
The fern forms a splendid ornament for shadowy nooks and grottoes, or
fragments of ruins, or heaps of stones, or the odd corners of a large
garden or pleasure-ground.
I have had many delightful associations with this plant both at home and
abroad. When I visited the beautiful Island of Penang, Sir William
Norris, then the Recorder of the Island, and who was a most
indefatigable collector of ferns, obligingly presented me with a
specimen of every variety that he had discovered in the hills and
vallies of that small paradise; and I suppose that in no part of the
world could a finer collection of specimens of the fern be made for a
botanist's _herbarium_.
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