THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NAMES OF PLANTS. 621 



now confine the name. The first syllable "bar " is the essential part, 

 and is still used by itself in Scotland, in the slightly altered form 

 ' bear ". It comes from the same root as our verb ' to bear ', in its 

 sense of " to sustain " : thus bar-ley is the sustaining plant, or plant 

 that sustains life. Corresponding words, from the same root, 

 are found in various languages of both Asia and Europe ; but 

 they are applied to very different grains. In Latin, for instance, 

 'far' meant spelt, while a newly related word, farina, meant flour. 

 We should therefore be unable to infer that barley was cultivated by the 

 early Arians were it not that the special names of this grain in Persian, 

 Latin and German are etymologically identifiable. In the primitive 

 Arian language the name corresponding to 'bar' was probably generic, 

 and signified any kind of cereal ; and the different branches of the race 

 have, after their separation, confined it specially to different grains. 

 Such specialisations are frequent, and one is now going on in America, 

 where our word 'corn' has lost the meaning that it has in England, of 

 grain in general, and is confined to the maize or Indian corn. 



Bean is our representative of another primitive word, coming from a 

 root signifying " to eat". The plant bears corresponding titles in Persian 

 and in nearly all European languages. 



The second class of names with which we have to deal is of those which 

 exist as native words in several families of language in Europe, but do 

 not extend into Asia. They must have been in use at the time when the 

 European branch of the Arians had not split up to into different sec- 

 tions. Perhaps the most interesting of them is ' beech ', a descendant of 

 an old Gothic boka. It comes from the same root as ' bean ' already 

 referred to as meaning 'to eat ', runs through all the Sclavonic, Teutonic 

 and Celtic languages, and is etymologically identical with the Latin fagvs 

 and Greek pliegos. In Greek the name appertains to an oak which 

 produces an edible acorn, and we can see the reasonableness of the title * 

 but in other languages it is applied to the beech ; and as its fruit or 

 'mast' can hardly be regarded as eatable by man, the name must have 

 reference to its serving as food for cattle. The tree, like the birch and 

 the willow, has bestowed its name on that which was made from it and 

 gives rise to the name for ' book ' in all Teutonic tongues. The Latin and 

 Greek names for book both come from the material used for writing on ; 

 and it is clear that tablets of beechwood were first used for this purpose 

 by the Teutonic tribes. 



