4- 54 Linnccan Society. 



62 or 63 degrees high. From thence diminished in brightness 

 it became soon blended with the milky way, and ceased to 

 be distinguishable. The belt seemed exactly similar to a ray 

 of the northern light, except that not the least corruscation 

 was to be observed. Its position could not be much out of 

 the magnetic equator. 



Sir William Elford, F.R.S. has favoured me with a detail 

 of the appearances seen near Totness, very much agreeing 

 with the above statements. 



I am, yours, &c. 



Davies Gilbert. 



LXXVII. Proceedings of Learned Societies. 



LINN^AN SOCTETY. 



Nov. 4. — TV/TR" Bicheno read a paper On the advantages attending 

 ^-▼A the use of the English Language in Natural History. 



The author insists that the use of Latin and other foreign languages 

 in the classification of Natural History has retarded its progress 3 and 

 that an acquaintance with the productions of nature was more exten- 

 sively diffused before the Latin became the vehicle of communication. 

 Gerard has recorded some thousands of English names of plants, de- 

 rived from an English stock, which are no longer in use j while every 

 indigenous species, however, to our ancestors seems to have had a 

 familiar name in English, Welsh and Erse. Every word particularly 

 had its appropriate appellation. Ask a farmer now how many plants 

 he is acquainted with, and he will betray an incredibly scanty stock 

 of knowledge, for one who is traversing the carpet of the earth many 

 hours of every day of his life : he will confound under the name of 

 Charlock more than half a dozen species, and out of a hundred kinds 

 of Grass he will be acquainted with a most insignificant number. 



Professor Michaelis remarks, that the Eastern nations must have 

 been better acquainted with the vegetable kingdom than ourselves -, 

 since we find more than 250 plants named in the Old Testament, by 

 writers who have made use of these names in prose and metre only 

 incidentally, and not as botanists -, and that in all probability such 

 knowledge must in those times have been very generally diffused. 



Of all sciences Natural History is one of observation. To lock it 

 up therefore in a dead language, or to give it less currency among 

 the rural part of the population, whose business is with the operations 

 of Nature, is to confine it within the bounds of the closet. For the 

 want of names the attention of the English scholar is not arrested, or 

 he has no means of recording his observations 5 and the learned, pent 

 up in cities, or only making an occasional excursion out of them, turn 

 their more copious vocabulary to less account, and their faculty of ob- 

 serving to such trifling and minute particulars as their studies will afford. 



The great storehouse of botanical and zoological names is still to 

 be found in the writings of the Greeks. Among them, learning and 



science 



