SCOTCH NAMES OF NATIVE WILD FLOWERS. 9 1 



was ugly; he used instead the term onbraw. Oncorns, then, are 

 grasses which are not corn, i.e., oats, but which look like it. 



Grass in Scotch is gers, and both words are allied to the 

 obsolete German word gerasen, meaning to grow or to be green. 

 Their root meaning, therefore, is anything that is green, anything 

 that grows, anything of a vegetable nature. The word green is 

 from the same root. Many of our plant names still retain the 

 primitive meaning of the word. 



Cotton-grass {Eriophoruni) is not a grass as we understand the 

 word now. Its Scotch name is cannach down, a reduplicative 

 name. Cannach is Gaelic and down is Saxon, and both words 

 mean the same thing — anything soft, woolly, or feathery. It is 

 also called wild-cotton — a name like the former, descriptive of its 

 appearance — and moss-crops, from its locality. The word crop, as 

 applied to plants — a crop of corn — is the same word crop — the 

 crop of a bird. It means a gathering or a collection, and it is 

 still properly applied in naming such plants as our stone-crops 

 (Sedum), insomuch as these bear their leaves in a radicle crop, or 

 bundle, or rosette. 



Ecclegrass is not a grass; it is the butterwort (Pinguicula 

 vulgaris). Ecde, in such words as Ecclefechan, means church. 

 But ecclegrass has no ecclesiastical connection whatever. Ic, ig, 

 eig, or icde means first an island and then a wet meadow : ecclegrass, 

 then, is the plant of the wet meadow — a very good descriptive 

 name. The same plant was also called sheep-rot, from its being 

 supposed to cause this disease among sheep. Marsh-pennywort 

 {Hydrocotyle vulgaris) also gets this name and for the same reason. 

 Ecclegrass has still another name, steep-grass — the plant steeped 

 or soaked in water — a name synonymous with ecclegrass. 



Potentilla anserina, or silver-weed, was moor-grass or moss- 

 grass from its locality. It has extended its quarters considerably 

 since it was named, for we find it in many places not moorland 

 now. But perhaps these habitats were once moorland, and the 

 presence of the plant may point to this fact. 



Scrubie-grass is scurvy-grass (Cochlearia). The English and 

 Scotch names are identical — the letters "u" and "r" being trans- 

 posed. It takes its name from its supposed efficacy in cases of 

 skin disease, disorders said to have been particularly prevalent in 

 our country in the good old times. Either its virtue has gone out 



