614 



THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NAMES OF PLANTS. 



By the late Thomas Comber, f.l.s., written about the 

 year 1880 but never published. 



(Read before the Bombay Natural History Society by E. Comber, F.Z.S.? 



on "21st January, 1904.) 



The paper that I submit for your acceptance this evening is on 

 " Plant names " ; and when I selected my subject, and fixed upon this 

 title, I could not help fancying that many of you, when you read 

 the announcement, would say to yourselves — or if you did not say it 

 you would think it — " what a very uninviting subject " ; and that you 

 would thereupon prepare yourselves for a very dry discourse. Not 

 long ago I was urging on a young lady to take up the study of botany, 

 and expatiated on the pleasures she would certainly derive from it ; 

 when in reply she assured me that she liked it extremely and would 

 take it up " were it not for those horrid names ". I fear she is a type 

 of a good many who are fond of flowers, and have felt more than 

 half inclined to enter on botanical studies, but have been deterred by the 

 hard names that have been given to plants. Encountering these at 

 the outset, and not having had time to become familiar with them, 

 they turn away from botany, and come, perhaps reluctantly, to the 

 conclusion that, the game is not worth the candle. Some of you may 

 anticipate that I am about to treat of these repulsive crack-jaw names, and 

 that you will thus have the most disagreeable part of botany, without any 

 of its redeeming features. Let me remark, in the first place, that, un- 

 inviting as these long names may appear when we first meet with them, 

 they improve vastly upon acquaintance, and become at last " familiar in 

 our mouths as household words". For instance, people now talk almost 

 as glibly of a rhododendron or a chrysanthemum as they do of a lily or a 

 rose, and this, too, without knowing the meaning that the former names 

 express, for few stop to consider that rhododendron means a rosy tree, 

 and chrysanthemum a golden flower ; and that the names were given 

 to the plants in allusion to the colour of the flowers of the varieties that 

 were first introduced into our gardens. If once we understand the 

 meaning of such names they lose much of their disagreeable sound. In 

 the second place, I must tell you that it is not at all of these so-called 

 scientific names that I wish to speak, but of the popular names which 

 we learnt as children, and have used all our livos. I propose that we 



