Compassionate Herbs. By C. F. Leyel. (Faber and Faber. 12s.
6d.)
IF you do not quite believe what she claims, Mrs. Leyel has written a valuable and pleasing book. She is, of course, the high-priestess of herbs, a learned botanist and student of the history of plants, endowed with an almost religious belief in their beneficial qualities. She is also an expert book-maker. The verse headings comprise an excellent anthology of good floral verse. The many drawings by Mildred Eldridge are both pleasing and accurate. The indices, in many languages, and the lists of local names have real value. The volume is one to treasure. It is full if not exhaustive. This re- viewer was unlucky ; the first four plants he looked up drew a blank —the nettle, which is compact of virtues, sauce-alone, whose savoury quality is itself medicinal, the mistletoe, in which his doctor believes, and the greater celandine which a local herbalist uses for warts. But this temporary disappointment was just bad luck. Omissions are really very few; and adverse criticism is concerned with quite another point. It was bad policy, as well as bad logic, to belittle penicillin (which after all is a vegetable drug) because doctors are not so completely herb-minded as Mrs. Leyel thinks they ought to be. Again the claims are often absurdly dogmatic, founded not on fact but faith, as of comfrey that "for diseased bones and diseased lungs it has no equal and it joins fractures and broken bones." However, some such excesses are expected and must be accepted. It is this ardency of her faith that has inspired Mrs. Leyel to her supreme achievements in this branch of botany. '
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