33 
that the yarrow, the ‘‘healer of wounds” in the armies of 
Rome, carries its patent of old nobility by having attached to its 
generic name, ‘‘ Achillea”’ one of its old synonyms ‘ Millefolium.” 
It is a puzzle to some why-so many plants have for specific name 
“vulgaris,” though not always common or general—some indeed 
being very rare in this country. In such cases it would seem that 
the name to which “‘ vulgaris”’ is attached as a descriptive, was the 
true and only name of the typical plant of the genus. So again 
the ancient renown is marked when a plant bears the name 
*¢ officinalis’ —‘‘ belonging to the workshop.” 
There is a host of plants, whose names are contained, not only 
in the Latin and Greek lists, but also in the Anglo-Saxon lists, 
which cannot be identified in the literary way. We use the same 
names now, it may be, but we cannot tell whether the plant is the 
same; indeed in hosts of instances we know quite well that the 
plants are not the same. Spring time draws to a close: the 
anemone of the woods is rapidly fading away and giving place to 
the hyacinth; Lent is gone and the Lenten lily or daffodil will soon 
be over. These names belong to the poetry of the Golden Age of 
Greece, and are still names of Shakespeare and Spenser and of 
Tennyson to-day. But the plants seemed to have changed, the 
names remain, empty names it may be in some cases, in others, 
names of far different plants. It is useless to enquire what plant 
it was that the classical poets and naturalists called anemone, the 
wind flower, or the pasque flower, for its quite clear that it was 
not always the same plant. 
Bion’s anemone sprang from the tears of Paphian Venus, as 
she wept over the slain Adonis :— 
Tears plenteous as his blood she pours amain, 
But gentle flowers are born and bloom around, 
From every drop that falls upon the ground ; 
Where streams his blood, there blushing springs the rose, 
And where a tear has dropped a wind flower blows. 
(Bion. Idyl. i. 62.) 
Pliny’s anemone never opens its flowers except when the wind 
blows—a statement evidently intended to explain the name. Ovid 
(Met. x. 737.) declares: “So lightly cling the petals, and so 
lightly fall they, when the breezes blow, that the same blast names 
the flower and the same destroys.” It has been suggested that 
some kind of cistus or rock rose may have been Pliny’s plant; but 
we cannot even guess at the others. 
All readers of Homer are familiar with the meadows decked 
with asphodel, where dwell the souls of departed heroes; and the 
Scholiast declares the plant intended to be ‘‘like a squill,’”’ doubtless 
some kind of lily was called ‘‘ asphodel”’ by the Greeks. Lucian in 
one of his dialogues makes Charon complain at being kept waiting 
