THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NAMES OF PLANTS. 623 



Tarious tribes of Teutons had parted asunder, for in each of their lan- 

 guages it bears a cognate name, which originally meant "white ". They 

 evidently so called the grain to distinguish it from rye, black oats, and 

 other dark-coloured corns with which they had previously been acquainted, 

 and this is supported by the Welsh name, which, although not etymolo- 

 gically identical, expresses exactly the same idea — "gwenith" being a com- 

 pound of " gwen " white, and " yd " corn. 



Another interesting word common to several Teutonic languages 

 is represented in English by " hawthorn ", that is, the tree used for 

 "haws", " hags ", or as we now call them, "hedges": and it bears 

 testimony, more reliable than the assertion of Caesar to the contrary, 

 that our Teuton forefathers had attained at a very early date to a 

 sufficient civilization to appropriate plots of ground as private pro- 

 party ; when, for the fences with which they marked their boundaries, 

 they used this plant, as we do still. 



The nettle bears a name which should be of special interest to ladies, 

 for it relates to what was, I fancy, even in those early Teutonic times, 

 the feminine department of our ancestors' household arrangements. 

 It comes from a root " ne ", meaning in most of the Arian languages to 

 spin or sew, from whence also comes our word " needle ". You will 

 perhaps wonder what the nettle can have had to do with sewing, but the 

 fact is that it supplied the thread. Flax and hemp were originally 

 southern plants, and bear southern names, but long before they were 

 introduced, the hardy nettle supplied the inhabitants of Northern Europe 

 with the fibre which they used for spinning. It remained in use until 

 quite recent times, for not long ago English maidens were not, in some 

 parts of the country, considered to have qualified themselves for matri- 

 mony until they had spun and woven for themselves a supply of nettle 

 house-linen. An experiment is now being made in Germany to revive 

 the cultivation of this plant for textile purposes. 



Let us proceed now to names found only in our own language. We 

 shall find that, having had less time to change from their original 

 expressive form, their meaning is often more easily discovered than is 

 the case with older names ; but yet they vary much in this respect. 

 Some still quite new, such as " Blue-Bell " and " Sun-flower ", speak 

 at once for themselves ; but those that go back to Anglo-Saxon times 

 are sometimes composed of words now fallen into disuse, and have thus 

 either altogether lost their expressive meaning, or else convey one that is 



