Gerarde says that the leaves of Arsmart (_Persicaria_) rubbed on the back of a tired horse, and a “good handfull or two laid under the saddle, will wonderfully refresh him;” and _Le petit Albert_ gives a recipe for making a horse go further in one hour than another would go in eight. You must begin by mingling a handful of “Satyrion” in his oats, and anointing him with the fat of a deer; then when you are mounted and ready to start “vous lui tournerez la têté du coté de soleil levant et vous penchant sur son oreille gauche vous prononçerez trois fois à voix basse les paroles suivantes et vous partirez aussi tôt: _Gaspar_, _Melchior_, _Merchisard_. T’ajonte à cecy que si vous suspenderez au col du cheval les grosses dents d’un loup qui aura étè tué en courant, le cheval ne sera pas fatigue de sa course.” No doubt these proceedings were carried out by the traveller with an air of mystery, and must have impressed the bystanders, but one wonders what the rider thought of them after an hour’s journeying? Satyrion is a kind of orchis. There was a herb called _Sferro Cavallo_ which was supposed to be able to break locks or draw off the shoes of the horses that passed over it. Sir Thomas Browne speaks of it in his “Popular Errors,” and laughs the idea to scorn, and “cannot but wonder at Matthiolus, who, upon a parallel in Pliny, was staggered into suspension” [of judgment]. This plant was probably the Horse-shoe Vetch, whose seed-vessels, being in the shape of horse-shoes, may have given rise to the superstition; but Grimm thought it was the _Euphorbia Lathyris_. The same belief is found in different countries, referred to other plants; the French thought that Rest Harrow had this marvellous property, and Culpepper tells the same tale about the Moonwort (_Botrychium Lunaria_), which had the country name of Unshoe-the-Horse. “Besides, I have heard commenders say that in White Down in Devonshire, near Tiverton, there were found thirty horse-shoes, pulled off from the feet of the Earl of Essex’s horses, being then drawn up in a body, many of them being but newly shod, and no reason known, which caused much admiration, and the herb described usually grows upon heaths.” One would hardly have thought that “admiration” was the feeling evoked, but perhaps nobody concerned was pressed for time!