The ferns of Great Britain and their allies, the club-mosses, pepperworts, and horsetails / by Anne Pratt ; published under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education, appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Anne Pratt

Date:: [1871]

Credit: The ferns of Great Britain and their allies, the club-mosses, pepperworts, and horsetails / by Anne Pratt ; published under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education, appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$Cochin-China by the name of Mahoang, and are called Chwostch by the Russians. The Horsetails are found in every latitude from the equator to the poles, abound- ing in the tropical parts of America and Asia, and at the Cape of Good Hope, but becoming rare as we advance towards the polar circles. Our native species were, by the old writers, termed Shave-grasses, and as this Corn Horsetail has much of the roughness given by the particles of flint, and as it is the most fretpient species, it is ])robably the plant sold in Queen Elizabeth’s time by the “ J lerbe-womcn of Chepeside,” under the names of Shave-grass and Pewter- wort, or Vitraria, though it would doubtless have been considered inferior to the E. hgemdle, which Gerarde calls “the small and naked Shave-grass, wherewith fletchers and combe-makers doe rub and })olish their worke.” It was very serviceable in the kitchens of olden times, and was doubtless used for cleaning the wooden spoons and ])lattcrs ; the “ breen ” of our fore- fathei-s, as well as the “ garnish ” of pewter. Although in carlv davs the tables of the opulent were served with silver, yet in humbler households wooden articles were commonly used at the daily meals, until the fifteenth and si.\teenth century, when pewter came into general use among the higher classes; though not until the beginning of the eighteenth centur}' were the articles made from it sufficiently cheap to admit of their being seen at any save the rich man’s table. Harrison, refer- ring to this in 1580, says that in some places “beyond the sea, a garnish of good flat pewter of an ordiriarie making is esteemed almost so pretious as the like num-$