SCOTCH NAMES OF NATIVE WILD FLOWERS. 103 



only a part — a very small part — of the whole of the names of our 

 Scottish wild flowers. Among those given there are no names of 

 alpine plants ; and more remarkable still, not one single repre- 

 sentative of our numerous and beautiful and characteristic sea-side 

 flowers. This may arise from the fact that there was no such 

 thing as a Scottish dictionary in existence till after the Scottish 

 language had gone pretty much into disuse, and that it had to be 

 manufactured of words collected from books, charters, old leases, 

 and Acts of Parliament. And if our floras of the present day were 

 lost as the genuine living old Scottish language now is, and it were 

 required to reproduce a new list from the works of the poets, 

 writings of fiction, charters, and Acts of Parliament, you can easily 

 understand how small the list would be, even with the enormously 

 increased literary means of accomplishing such a task lying open 

 to our hands. 



Such has been very much the nature of the make-up of 

 our present list, and such is the main reason, I believe, of its 

 paucity. I have taken it from the 181S edition of Jamieson's 

 Scottish Dictionary. 



