€24 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XV. 



misleading. Marigold, another Anglo-Saxon name, has experienced a 

 like change of application, and is of rather complex origin. The last 

 syllable " gold " Was a title given formerly to many different kinds of 

 yellow flowers, in reference to their colour ; and the Anglo-Saxon word 

 " mear ", or as we now write it " mare ", meaning a horse, was prefixed 

 to distinguish one of these flowers of large coarse growth, namely that 

 which we now term the marsh marigold. The placing of the word 

 " horse " before a plant-name, to signify coarseness of growth or flavour, 

 is not uncommon, for we speak of horse-mint, horse-chestnut, horse- 

 radish, &c, and the Greeks used their Word for horse in a similar way. 

 In course of time the English " mare-gold ' came to be misunderstood 

 as " mary-gold," and was transferred to the garden plant that now 

 bears the title. 



Even words which cannot be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon vocabu- 

 laries and are therefore presumably of later or English origin, sometimes, 

 through corruption of mispronunciation, no longer convey their original 

 expressive meaning. Thus " bulrush " is a corruption of " pool-Tush "; 

 and " carnation " has no reference, as some suppose, to the flower 

 being often of a flesh colour, but was originally written " coronation", 

 and the flower took this title from having been much used for making 

 chaplets and garlands. 



Many names of English origin express the medical properties which 

 the plants possess, or were supposed to possess at the time when herbs 

 constituted nearly the whole of the pharmacopoeia. In their administration 

 the doctors or leeches of the age were guided by what was known as the 

 doctrine of signatures, based on the belief that each plant bore an out- 

 ward sign declaring to any careful observer the disease for which it was a 

 medicine. The spotted leaves of one plant showed that it was a sure 

 remedy for spotted or tuberculous lungs, and it was called the lungwort; 

 the lobed laaves of a fern resemble the spleen in shape, and it was there- 

 fore held to be good for all diseases of the spleen, and was named 

 spleenwort ; and a Canterbury bell, which has the throat of its flowers 

 rough with hairs, was considered infallible for roughness or hoarseness 

 of the throat, and was consequently known as "throatwort" 



All the names we have so far treated of are genuine natives, and have 

 originated in some stage or other of our own mother-tongue ; but we 

 must now pass to names which have been adopted from foreign languages, 

 and, although now thoroughly incorporated with our own, are in reality 



