66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of old world folk-lore was a part of this transplanting much of which 

 has come down to us in the names of plants and in the various other 

 forms of speech. Garden-craft and the ' art of simpling ' was a part 

 of every housewife's knowledge, and plants were diligently sought for 

 their healing virtues. Knowledge of this kind was also to some extent 

 gained from the Indian inhabitants. In all the earlier descriptions 

 of the new world such objects had a prominent place, together with 

 the character of the land and aboriginal peoples and the advantages 

 for settlement. One can see in these accounts the evident striving 

 of the European mind to find suitable names and to describe an object 

 by its likeness to familiar objects at home. 



The few records that we have of the impressions of the earlier 

 colonists are scattered through old journals, letters and histories of 

 travel, and the references to plants and animals are often exceedingly 

 obscure as to the species indicated. The question of the origin of 

 names is at best recondite. Names are part of the folk-lore of peoples ; 

 they came into existence far back in a dim past, long before the period 

 of written history. When we do find them gathered in ancient vocabu- 

 laries, as in the one of Aelfric (955-1020 a.d.), we may be sure that 

 they were even then venerable with age. The new world has added 

 comparatively little to the stock of old world nomenclature. More 

 often an old name has been given to an entirely different thing from 

 the one that it originally stood for, and has been twisted into a new 

 meaning with new associations. Thus the word creek originally meant 

 the tidal estuary of a small river, a place where vessels might find 

 harbor, and it is so used throughout Great Britain to-day. In certain 

 parts of the United States, notably along the middle and southern 

 Atlantic seaboard, the word has been extended to the small tributary 

 of a river throughout its entire course. In England these little inland 

 streams are called ' brooks,' which is clearly their rightful name — 

 shallow water-courses with much tumbling and bickering over stony 

 places. Milton very clearly distinguishes between the two where in 



' Paradise Eegained ' 



Freshet or purling brook, 



may be contrasted with the lines in ' Paradise Lost ' 



Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, 

 Both are here pictured with their characteristic associations, the one 

 as an upland stream, the other as a tidal inlet. In the Bible the word 

 ' creek ' is used with perfect clearness as to its meaning in the descrip- 

 tion of Paul's shipwreck — " And when it was day, they knew not the 

 land : but they discovered a certain creek with a shore, into which they 

 were minded, if it were possible, to thrust in the ship." Here we have 

 the idea of a harbor in the use of the word. It is possible, I think, to 

 see how our brooks have come to be called ' creeks ' when we reflect 

 that south of New England the large rivers have many smaller streams 



