S2G JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XV. 



a similar habit of growth. Lettuce is descended from the Latin " lactuca", 



a name descriptive of the milky juice of this vegetable ; while pisum, the 



predecessor of our pease, meant something that had been shelled 



or freed from its husks. When the latter name passed into our language 



it signified a single seed ; and people talked of a pease in just the 



same manner as they did of a bean. Its plural was formed, like " oxen" 



and " hosen ", by adding " n", viz., peasea, or as it was sometimes 



written peason. This plural form survived in rustic dialects until quite 



recently, being used by such folk as the old farmer, who 



" talked of turmets and of jieason " 



" And several good seed in proper season. 



More generally pease came, in course of time, to be regarded as 

 itself the plural, and a singular was formed for it in our present pea. 

 Some of our names from the Latin have, like so many of those from 

 the Greek, reference to places ; as, for instance, " damson ", a corruption 

 of " prunum damascena " or " Damascus plum ". 



French, besides serving as the channel whereby most of the Greek and 

 Latin names have come to us, has given us also many of its own. You 

 will at once think of" mignonette", meaning "little darling"; and of 

 " pansy ", which is merely the French pensce, a thought, as Shakes- 

 peare writes : " There 'is pansies, that for thoughts ; r but equally 

 French is " dandelion ", otherwise " dent de lion " or lion's tooth, so 

 called probably from the tooth-like cutting of the leaf; and " eglantine ", 

 &c, as Chaucer and the old poets write it, eglantere, which is a corruption 

 of the French " aiglentiev" , from aiglent, covered with prickles. Mush- 

 room is the French mouscheron, from mousche, a fly ; and the name 

 appears to have been given first to a poisonous species of fungus, 

 formerly used for killing flies, then extended to a generic term, and lastly 

 specialised to the edible species to which it now appertains. The " Wil- 

 liam" of "Sweet William" shows in its present form no sign of being 

 French ; but it comes from " oeillet," literally little eye, the French 

 generic name for pink, which was anglicised as " Willy " and thence 

 passed into " William ". 



Italian has given us several names ; amongst them cabbage, which 

 represents the Italian cabuccio, a diminutive formed from cabo, a head, 

 and applied to the vegetable, evidently in allusion to its round head-like 

 shape. The earliest form of primrose was the Italian " Jior de prima 

 vera", or " flower of first spring", which was shortened into "prima 



