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



origin, and have come into use after the great split which seems 

 to have taken place in the Arian tribes, of whom part spread southward 

 in Asia and occupied Persia and India, while others migrated to the West 

 and occupied Europe. In doing so they drove back or exterminated 

 the former inhabitants, of whom only scattered remnants are now found, 

 Speaking languages entirely different from the Arian ones, such as the 

 Magyars of Hungary, the Laplanders, Finns, and the curious tribe on 

 shores of the Bay of Biscay. Other words, again, are still less ancient, 

 and seem to have come into use when there had taken place a further 

 subdivision of the Arian tribes in Europe ; for they are found only in a 

 particular family of languages, such as the Teutonic. Sclavonic, or 

 Romance ; so that we may conclude that they originated after the 

 Teuton? had separated from the Sclavs, and both from the Latin race. 

 Nest we have words which are not found even in other languages of 

 the same family as our own, such as German, Dutch or Danish, 

 but are confined to our own Anglo-Saxon tongue ; and these are 

 evidently of comparatively recent date, springing up after the Anglc- 

 Saxons had separated from their relatives on the Continent. Last of all 

 come words which we have borrowed from other languages, mostly 

 from the Latin, either directly or more frequently through the French, 

 these last having come in with the Normans at the time of the conquest, 

 and been gradually incorporated in that highly compound production 

 which we speak of as the English language. We see, then, that our mo- 

 ther tongue consists of many successive strata, some very much older than 

 others ; and just as geologists from the study of the fossils that are found 

 in the different strata of the earth's crust have been able to construct a 

 history of the progressive development of life upon ou? globe, so 

 philologists, by separating languages into their different strata, are now 

 building up a history of the early tribes from which the greater part 

 of the present population of Europe, and not inconsiderable part 

 of that of Asia, are descended. 



I have entered into this long digression because our plant names 

 exhibit a like stratification to that of our language in general. We 

 have a few native plant names that are found m use in both portions of 

 the Arian district ; about an equal number are indigenous in several of 

 the European families of language, considerably more are Teutonic. 

 Some, again, are Anglo-Saxon or English, but by far the greatest majority 

 are borrowed from other languages ; and many of these last, although 



