6o The hish Naturalist. [March, 



species. It is not easy to unravel the paragraph in which this 

 charge is made, so contradictory is it and full of unwarrantable 

 assumptions. Mr. Hart's reasoning appears to be somewhat 

 in this fashion : our name, Bainne caoi7i, is wrongly spelt 

 because it is spelt differently from the name, Buidhe na 

 7iinoea7i, given by O'Reilly ; the interpretation which we give 

 of our name is wrong, because it differs from Mr. Hart's 

 interpretation of O'Reilly's name. Now O'Reilly's name, as 

 Mr. Hart himself admits in this very paragraph of his Remarks^ 

 is a purely generic one ; but for the purpose of his argument, 

 to prove, in short, that we are wrong, it is essential that the 

 name should be made specific and should be applied to 

 Euphorbia hibe??ia. This our critic accordingly proceeds to 

 do, in perfect oblivion of his acceptance of the w^ord as generic 

 and, so far as we can see, without a shred of evidence ; and 

 having further assumed that our name and O'Reilly's are the 

 same, the conclusion inevitably follows, that our Irish 

 spelling is hopelessly wrong, unless we spell better than 

 O'Reilly, and we cheerfully concede that any such assumption 

 is inadmissible. Having thus convicted us of incompetence 

 in spelling, there is little difficulty in convicting us of incom- 

 petence in translation. Mr. Hart, with great intrepidity, in 

 our opinion, englishes O'Reilly's name into " the yellow 

 wave-lover," while we english our name (conjecturally, with 

 a note of interrogation) into " mild milk." It is obvious to 

 the meanest capacity that " mild milk " is different from " the 

 yellow wave-lover," and Mr. Hart's rendering being right ours 

 must be wrong. Therefore we cannot be trusted either to 

 spell or to translate Irish correctly. Is it necessary to assert 

 the obvious fact that Bai7i7ie caoi7i and Buidhe 7ia 7ii7igea7i are 

 utterly distinct names, and to point out that, this fact once 

 grasped, Mr. Hart's argumentative house of cards topples to 

 the ground ? 



Having in self-defence dealt thus unsparingly with our 

 critic in the matter of the Irish Spurge, we are happy to be 

 able to thank him for fresh information as regards the Scotch 

 Fir. His evidence for the present use of the Irish name 

 gui77ihas ox giiibhas (gyoos) in Donegal is most welcome ; for 

 in spite of Joyce's and Cameron's discussion of this question 

 we did not feel quite satisfied as to the current Irish use of 



