IV PREFACE. 



custom to Speak of plants by their English names, as we find the poet 



Crabbe thus describing an exceptional case : — 



Higli-sounding words our worthy gardener gets, 

 And at Ills club to wondering swains repeats ; 

 He there of Jthus and Rhododendron speaks, 

 And Allium calls his Onions and his Leeks. 



There Arums, there Leontodons we view, 

 And Artemisia grows where Wormwood grew. 



(Crabbe's " Parish Register," Part I., Baptisms.) 



and there can be little doubt that many good old English plant-names 

 which, happily, are still preserved to us in books, have been gradually 

 ousted from popular use and sacrificed for Latin terms, not from any 

 conviction that these were better or more appropriate, but simply 

 through the spread of the craze for " high-sounding words." To quote 

 Mr. Earle further, " The adoption of classical words Avas in deference to 

 the prestige of the classical languages at first, then it became a piece of 

 scholastic j)edantry which, spreading ever wider and wider, became at 

 length a fashion because it was a flag of social pretension." 



A botanist writes in The Garden (vol. xxiii., p. 403) : — " But what 

 do we see in popular naming ? . . . . The whole business 

 breeds nothing but confusion, as if there was not enough already in the 

 same direction." Such a remark comes with a peculiarly bad grace from 

 a scientific botanist, and may be regarded as a stone thrown by one who 

 lives in a glass house of rather extensive dimensions, when Ave consider the 

 deplorable condition of his own pet nomenclature in this respect. There 

 is, in fact, no greater stumbling-block and no more torturing embarrass- 

 ment in the way of the botanical student than the swarms of synonyms 

 which beset him at almost every step and, like the aliases of a culprit 

 who is "wanted," serve rather to conceal than to point out the subjects 

 to which they are aj^plied. The whole family of the Conifeiae, for in- 

 stance, is almost smothered in this way, as anyone may see who chooses 

 to look into the last edition of Gordon's " Pinetum," Avhere he will find 

 that nearly all the trees there described have a greater or less number 

 of synonyms applied to them, several of them as many as half-a-dozen or 

 more apiece ! The practical results of this extreme plurality of scientific 

 synonyms are Avell exemplified by an instance which occurred last year, 

 when a correspondent of The Garden wrote to the effect that "The 

 Bluebell of Scotland is Agraphis nutans," and that " the English Blue- 

 bell is Hyacinthus non-scriptus " (The Garden for June 9, 1888, p. 523), 

 in evident ignorance that the two names are synonymous for the same 

 plant, Avhich lias yet the tAvo other synonyms of Scilla nutans and 

 Hyacinthus anglicus. 



Many of the ncAv names Avhich have appeared in The Garden 

 were absolutely needed for pjlants Avhich previously had no popular 



