The Scottish Naturalist. 6$ 



PLANT NAMES. 



By WM. DURIE. 



{Read at the Meetings on igth July, 1SS3, of the Arbroath Horticultural 



and Natural History Society). 



C~^ RANT ALLEN, in his charming " Vignettes from Nature,' 7 

 JT provides a very suitable text and an ample justification 

 for a paper on the names of plants, in these words : " Our 

 thoughts about Nature are often too largely interwoven with hard 

 technicalities concerning rotate corollas and pedicellate racemes ; 

 and I, for my part, am not ashamed to confess that I like some- 

 times to see the dry light of science diversified with some more 

 fallacious scintillations of the litcrac humaniores, or even with some 

 will-o'-the wisp of pure poetical imagination." The necessity for 

 giving different names to different forms of vegetable life must have 

 led, in the childhood of the world, to the assigning of distinguishing 

 names by which each kind which early man had occasion to notice 

 should be known. Popular names of plants have been conferred 

 through the operation of various causes, which will be shortly 

 noted and fully illustrated further on. But it was long before 

 scientific names, properly so called, were invented, not indeed till 

 last century, however great the convenience appeared of having a 

 uniform system of naming which would enable observers all over 

 the world to compare with certainty their respective discoveries. 

 Many prejudices had, however, to be overcome. A good example 

 of this is seen in the anecdote of an old naturalist, who, about 200 

 years ago, when the great fact of the two sexes in plants was being 

 established, objected that the ascribing of sexes to flowers sullied 

 their virgin purity ! Linnaeus, by his artficial system, " his rough 

 and ready classification," based on such sexual distinctions, and 

 by his rigorous definitions, did much towards the formation of a 

 universal and easily followed system of naming, although it has 

 been urged against his system that " it led only to a knowledge 

 of names, to a mere index of genera and species." But Nature 

 proved too rich in variety and too prolific in distinctions to fall 

 exactly within the limits of his cast-iron system. As remarked by 

 Goethe, the German poet who first proved the evolution of the 

 flower from the leaf: "Naturalists are probably delighted when 

 they have brought any peculiar plant under some head ; but still 

 Nature carries on her own free sport, without troubling herself 



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