THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NAMES OF PLANTS. 025 



only naturalized. This appropriation of alien names has long been 

 going on, at any rate from the time when the Teutonic settlers came 

 into contact with Roman civilization, and adopted tho Latin names for 

 such vegetable productions as were then introduced to them. We thus 

 find in the Anglo-Saxon vocabularies borrowed names for many culti- 

 vated plants, such as tho pear and the plum, fennel and mint, the lily and 

 tho rose. 



At the time of the conquest there was a groat accession of foreign 

 names, brought in by the Normans ; and since then, as fresh plants have 

 come into cultivation they have often carried into our English language 

 fresh names, being modifications, more or less corrupt, of those which 

 they bore in tho country from whence they were brought to us. To 

 show the great variety of languages from which we have borrowed, I 

 will give a few examples of each. 



A great number of our names are of Greek origin. They have 

 come to us not directly, but through the Latin, and generally 

 also through French. Thyme is little changed from the Greek 

 thumos, which came from there, I fumigate, and was applied to 

 fragrant herb much used as incense in sacrificial offerings. A 

 largo proportion of the Greek plant names are connected with the 

 names of places, and indicate from whence the plant was introduced to 

 the Greeks. Thus peach was in itsearliest stage melon persikon, meaning 

 persian apple ; cherry takes its name from a town of Asia Minor ; chestnut 

 from a city of Thessaly ; carraioay seeds from Caria; and cypress from 

 the island so recently added to the British dominions. How the names 

 of places came to be thus attached to plants we can readily understand, 

 for we have plenty of instances in our own language. A grocer will 

 supply us with currants, i.e., Corinth raisins ; farmers talk familiarly 

 of their crop of Swedes ; whilst a market woman will assure us that some 

 of her apples are real Ribstons, or Blenheims, or Newtoiuns. 



It is from the Latin wherein these Greek names were as much aliens as 

 in our own language, that they have come down to us ; but we have 

 also received from it many names that are of genuinely Latin origin. 

 Vetch, or as it was formerly often spelt fytch, is a corruption of the 

 Latin vicia, and comes from a verb signifying to bind, with reference to 

 the manner in which this plant binds together by its tendrils the herbage 

 over which it creeps. It was thus exactly equivalent in meaning to our 

 English " bindweed ", a name appertaining to tho convolvulus, which has 

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