PHYTOLOGY, 



SCOTTISH PLANT-NAMES. 



"TT seems desirable," writes Dr Prior in the introduction to 

 ■*■ the second edition of his interesting work on the "Popular 

 Names of British Plants," "that these old names [of plants] 

 should be preserved, but there is already much greater difficulty 

 in obtaining a correct list of those of any particular district, and 

 the meaning of them, than there was a generation ago, from the 

 dying out of the race of herb-doctors, and of the simplers, gene- 

 rally females, who used to collect for them. It is doubtful, 

 indeed, whether any one of this class could now be found, who 

 has learnt them from tradition, and independently of modern 

 books." "In the northern counties and Scotland, the nomen- 

 clature is very different from that of the middle and south of 

 England, and contains many words of Norse origin, and many 

 of Frisian, but unfortunately these have been so vaguely applied 

 that nobody knows to what plants they, any of them, pro- 

 perly belong." "Popular plant names, quite as much as popular 

 tales, superstitions, ballads and remedies, arise with a higher and 

 more educated class of society, and merely survive in a lower 

 after they have elsewhere become obsolete. We can scarcely 

 read without a smile of scorn the meaning of such names as 

 Fumitory, Devil's Bit, Consound, and Celandine. But it is to 

 men of great celebrity in their day, to Greek and Latin writers, 

 such as Theophrastus, Aristotle, Dioscorides, and Pliny, to 

 Arabian physicians, the most accomplished men of their time, 

 and to the authors and translators of our early herbals, that we 

 are indebted for nearly all such names as these. We are not to 

 criticise them, or attempt to explain them away, but honestly 

 to trace them back to their origin, and in doing so to bear in 

 mind, for our own humiliation, that those who have betrayed 



