previous next

CHAP. 62—THE PERDICIUM. THE ORNITHOGALE.

It is not in Egypt only that the perdicium1 is eaten; it owes its name to the partridge,2 which bird is extremely fond of digging it up. The roots of it are thick and very numerous: and so, too, with the ornithogale,3 which has a tender white stalk, and a root half a foot in thickness, bulbous, soft, and provided with three or four other offsets attached to it. It is generally used boiled in pottage.4

1 Supposed by most commentators to be the Parietaria officinalis of Linnæus; Wall pellitory or parietary. Some, however, have suggested the Polygonum maritimum, or the Polygonum divaricatum of Linnæus. Fée expresses doubts as to its identity, but remarks that the modern Greek name of pellitory is "perdikaki." See c. 104 of this Book, and B. xxii. c. 20.

2 "Perdix," the Greek name.

3 Probably the Ornithogalum umbellatum of Linnæus. Sprengel identifies it with the Ornithogalum natans: but that variety is not found in Greece, while the other is.

4 "Puls."

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (10 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: