(italicised below) is taken, occurred. Ovid relates that Apollo,
meeting Cupid, jeered at his child’s bows and arrows as mere
playthings. In revenge Cupid forged two arrows, one of gold and the
other of lead. The golden one he shot at Apollo, to excite desire; the
leaden arrow, which repelled desire, was shot at Daphne. The legend
ends by the nymph being metamorphosed into a laurel which Apollo
thenceforth wore as a wreath. One of the incidents narrated by Ovid
represents the god telling the nymph who he is. Dryden’s version makes
him say:
Perhaps thou knowest not my superior state
And from that ignorance proceeds thy hate.
A somewhat uncouth method of seeking to ingratiate himself with the
reluctant lady. Among his attainments Apollo says:
Invention medicina meum est, _Opiferque per orbem
Dicor_, et herbam subjecta potentia nobis.
Dryden versifies these lines thus:
Medicine is mine, what herbs and simples grow
In fields and forests, all their powers I know,
And am the great physician called below.
The arms of the Society of Apothecaries are thus described in Burke’s
“Encyclopædia of Heraldry,” 1851:
“In shield, Apollo, the inventor of physic, with his head radiant,
holding in his left hand a bow, and in his right a serpent. About the
shield a helm, thereupon a mantle, and for the crest, upon a wreath
of their colours, a rhinoceros, supported by two unicorns, armed and
ungulated. Upon a compartment to make the achievement complete, this
motto: ‘Opiferque per orbem dicor.’”
[Illustration: ARMS OF THE SOCIETY OF APOTHECARIES.]
It was William Camden, the famous antiquary and “Clarenceux King at
Arms” in James I.’s reign, who hunted out the middle of the above Latin
quotation for the newly incorporated Society of Apothecaries.