favourite with good housewives for many years; for an old song of Heywood's, enumerating the cries of London in his time, has this line,

"I ha' rock samphier, rock samphier."

The inhabitants of places whose rocks abound with this plant use it not only as a pickle, but also as an ingredient in salads; and they also eat it as a culinary vegetable. It is sometimes grown in gardens and pots, and it appears under certain circumstances to thrive well. Thus Braddick, the horticulturist, who cultivated the samphire in Thames Ditton, on a sheltered and dry spot, well screened from the morning sun, and who sprinkled the soil where it grew with powdered barilla, remarks of it, "This I do to furnish the plant with a supply of soda, since, in its native place of growth, it possesses the power of decomposing sea-water, from which it takes the fossil alkali, and rejects the muriatic acid." This horticulturist also protected it from the cold of winter, and he found that by this mode of treatment the plants flourished most plentifully, and produced a large supply of leaves and shoots, which were cut twice in the

season.

The stem of the samphire is about a foot high, round and leafy; and it has dense clusters of greenish-white flowers. The whole plant is fleshy and glaucous, with a salt aromatic flavour. It grows on several rocky shores of our southern coast, but it is not common in the north of England. It is very rare on the rocks of Scotland; and Sir William Hooker remarks of it," It is found only, I believe, on the coast of Galloway, and thence northward to Colzean Castle, Ayr

shire (whence I have received numerous specimens), and at Aberlady, Haddingtonshire." He adds, that when the process of drying this plant for the Herbarium is aided by immersion in hot water, a number of opaque white dots make their appearance on the surface.

The samphire is always found on rocks or stone walls beyond the reach of the tide. The chalk hills of Dovor, which gave its old name to that ancient town, the Dwyr of the Saxons, from their "Dwfyrrha," a "steep place," have long been celebrated for the growth of samphire. Michael Drayton refers to it in his Poly-Olbion :

"Some, his ill-season'd mouth that rightly understood, Rob Dover's neighbouring cleeves of samphyre, to excite His dull and sickly taste, and stir up appetite."

And the very name of the Shakspeare Cliff was derived from its connexion with the passage in which the great dramatist refers to this plant. That cliff has recently suffered from the longcontinued action of rain and sunshine upon it; but as long as it exists, the samphire will probably continue to thrive there. We must quote again the oft-quoted lines on this subject, and which, indeed, well describe the scene from the summit of the cliff:

"How fearful,

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles; half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire,-dreadful trade;
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head;
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring bark
Diminish'd to her cock, her cock a buoy,
Almost too small for sight: the murm'ring surge,
That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes,

Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong."

This trade of samphire gathering from the cliff has indeed proved a dangerous one. A few years since, a man, resident in Dovor, and who had for many summers gathered the plant for sale in the neighbourhood, was suspended, as usual, by a rope attached to a pole at the summit. The rope, on this occasion, suddenly gave way, and the unfortunate man was precipitated to the base of the cliff, and expired immediately.

The word Samphire is a corruption of St. Pierre, the plant having, in former times, been dedicated to the memory of the Apostle; and it was also familiarly called St. Peter's Herb. It had, besides, the name of Crest Marine. The monks, as we well know, gave the names of the wild plants known to them, according to the times when they came into blossom, making them the remembrancers of their saints' days and festivals. Upwards of three hundred plants, now in use, and recorded in our works of medical botany, under different names, were known in years long passed away in the monasteries, as the medicinal herbs used by the religious orders. A writer in Rees's Encyclopædia says that we ought to pronounce and spell the name of this plant sampire, our modern orthography and pronunciation being a corruption of this. But our quotations from the old writers serve to show that various modes of spelling the word were used in past times; nor indeed need we wonder at this, when even in the days of Queen Elizabeth a man would spell his own name half a dozen ways if it could possibly bear such a variety

of modes of orthography. The word samphier, as Heywood spells it, seems to give the nearest similarity in sound to its original derivation.

Crabbe, who resided at a part of our coast where vegetation is peculiarly barren, refers to this plant, as well as to one mentioned afterwards, the saltwort. His pictures of sea-shore scenery are always mournful and dreary, nor is this description of the salt river-side less so:

"With ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide ;
Flowing, it fills the channel vast and wide;
Then back to sea, with strong majestic sweep,
It rolls in ebb, yet terrible and deep:

Here sampire banks and saltwort bound the flood;
There stalks of sea-weed withering in the mud;
And higher up, a ridge of all things base,

Which some strong tide has roll'd upon the place."

The samphire is found also on the rocky shores of other countries, as in Italy, Spain, and France, and is used there, as with us, as an article of food and luxury.

Somewhat similar to this plant, and commonly known as the annual samphire, is the jointed glasswort (Salicornia herbacea), so abundant on the salt marshes near our coast, or on muddy shores occasionally overflowed by the tide. It is a leafless herb, of pale bright green, and much succulence, and it flowers in August and September. The poor people who reside in the neighbourhood of these marshes gather this plant, and sell it for the purpose of pickling; and, assisted by strongly flavoured spices, it is certainly as good a herb for a pickle as many another one commonly used; but the aromatic flavour of the real samphire is wanting in this plant, whose juices have in themselves only a saltish mawkish flavour. Those who know

the real samphire are not likely to purchase this; and similar as it is in general appearance, it differs much in its flowers, which consist of dense spikes, jointed like the stem, and bearing at the base of every articulation, on two opposite sides, a cluster of three little blossoms. It was formerly called jointed glasswort, crabbe grasse, and frog grasse, and we now frequently hear it termed marsh samphire, to distinguish it from the rock plant. Its saltish taste renders it very agreeable to animals, and it is one of the plants which, on our saline soils, prove so beneficial to cattle, that they are often sent there by their owners to regain lost flesh and strength. Most animals enjoy feeding on this kind of herbage, as the whole of it must be more or less impregnated with salt, and it is not unlikely that the sea air has upon the frame of the inferior animals the same invigorating effect which it has upon the constitution of man.

This glasswort, as well as several other species, abounds on the shores of the Mediterranean, and they are all included under the name of Erba-cali, by the Italians, while the German name of glassschmaltz, like our glasswort, is significant of the uses of these plants in Germany. In the south of Europe, as well as in northern Africa, this salicornia was burnt for the soda which its ashes contain; and this material was much in use by the soap and glass manufacturer of these countries. At Marseilles, especially, a great quantity was gathered from the sea-shores for the purpose of burning for soda. We have another British species, called the creeping-glasswort (Salicornia radicans), which is very much like the former kind, only that it is more branching and strag