Note 42 — Chapter IX

Man’s ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other plants have come into use: a hundred exotic vegetables have become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor Comforters is clean forgotten!—Nay, who now remembers or even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless nature? The Asclepias acida, Sarcostemma, or flesh-plant, which for five thousand years was the Holy Wafer of the East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred millions of men,—this plant, in the Middle Ages called the Poison-queller (vince-venenum), meets with not one word of historical comment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois on the Soma of India and the Hom of Persia. Mem. de l’Académie des Inscriptions, xix. 326.