Recreations of a naturalist / [James Edmund Harting].

  • James Edmund Harting
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Recreations of a naturalist / [James Edmund Harting]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    412/465 page 388
    him a native of Tours and a nephew of St Martin. About few other saints does so much uncertainty prevail—even the year and day of his birth are matters of dispute. The festival of St Patrick, as every one knows, is observed throughout Ireland on March 17, but whether that is the date of his birth, or the day of his death, no one apparently has been able to decide. If Samuel Lover maybe credited with any knowledge of the subject, the 17th of the month is more likely to have been the date of the saint’s death, for in his humorous lines on “ St Patrick’s Birthday,” he wrote :— “ On the eighth day of March it was, some people say, That St Patrick at midnight he first saw the day; While others declare ’twas the ninth he was born, And ’twas all a mistake between midnight and morn.” But we are at present concerned, not so much with the life of St Patrick and the date of his birth or death, as with the natural history of the little three-leaved plant with which his name is indis- solubly connected. Here again authorities differ. What the original Shamrock was is a question now impossible to decide. We can only consider probabilities and long usage. Turning to the cele- brated Herbal of John Gerard, published in 1597, we find his opinion to be that the true Shamrock is the common Meadow Clover {Trifolium pratense). The equally celebrated English botanist, John Ray, was of the same opinion. More than ten years, however, before Gerard’s work appeared, Stanihurst in Holinshed’s Chronicle (1586), wrote of “ water-
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3