THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NAMES OF PLANTS. 619 



they may be of great antiquity in their original language, are quite 

 recent as English words, having been introduced within the last 200 or 

 300 years. It will perhaps be most convenient if I take each class of 

 name in its chronological order and give you specimens as I go along : 

 for it is, of course, impossible to attempt in a single paper to explain all 

 our names, and I must be content with citing only a few typical 

 examples. 



Let us take first a name which has been familiar to us in our earliest 

 childhood, and was in the school days of many of us a name of dread, al- 

 though I believe it no longer awakens in the mind of the boy of the period 

 associations of a like painful nature. I mean the birch, or as it is called 

 north cf the Tweed, the birk. This tree is still known by the same 

 name on the slopes of the Himalayas as on the shores of the Atlantic, the 

 present Hindustani form being bhurja, and the name is found, with 

 only slight variations, in all the languages of Northern Europe, whether 

 Teutonic, Sclavonic, or Celtic. It has reference, like most tree names, 

 to what was the most useful product of the tree, namely its bark, which 

 is to this day used by many savage or half-civilized tribes for a variety 

 of purposes, amongst others for roofing houses and making greaves or 

 mocassins to protect the legs. Now bark is that which surrounds and 

 protects a tree, and the word comes from a verb meaning to protect or 

 shelter (in German bergen), from whence come also our wowhborough or 

 burg, meaning originally a town surrounded and. protected by walls, and 

 park, a tract of land enclosed by palings. Birch bark being the sort 

 most used, the tree came to be regarded as preeminently the bark 

 tree, and was so called. We may therefore be sure that the old Arians 

 used the material formerly, as the North American Indians do still. One 

 of the chief purposes for which the Indians use birch hark is for making 

 their canoes; and our Teutonic ancestors evidently at one time used 

 it in like manner, for they called the vessels so made by the name of the 

 material, as testified by our words "bark" and "barge", and similar 

 ones, with the same meaning, in many European languages. 



On the fact that the present natives of India and the people of 

 Northern Europe call the birch by the same name, has been based an 

 argument that their common ancestors must have inhabited a northern 

 clime; for the birch is more particularly a northern tree; and it is con- 

 tended that when the Brahminical race invaded India, this was the only 

 tree they recognissd, all the others being strange to them. But the birch. 



