the attraction of utility. Formerly, in many parts of the country, 
several species were used as sources from which to obtain dyes, 
but the Lichens of sunnier countries possess these colorific qualities 
in greater degree, and for many years our native species have been 
left quite unused, and they are thus completely passed over as 
things of neither use nor beauty. 
Such being the case, we need not be surprised that we have no 
English name for these plants, and that botanists have had to 
borrow from another tongue a designation for the class. There 
are certainly a few local names given to those species formerly 
used for the manufacture of dyes. In some parts of Scotland, for 
instance, such plants are known as crott/es, in the Highlands as 
kork or korkalett, in Wales as kenkerig, and in Durham and North- 
umberland as sfony-rag; but the more general name is moss. Thus 
those tiny grey cups, edged round with scarlet, are called cup-mosses, 
and we have also the veindeer-moss and the Lceland-moss. ‘These 
latter names were indeed given to the species they denote by 
botanists, and do not spring from the folk. They fit in, however, 
very well with popular opinion, for almost universally, by persons 
unacquainted with modern botanical classification, such Lichens 
as are by any chance brought before their notice are considered to 
be species of moss. Both the notion and the names are relics of 
older views, and if we wish to discover what species of Lichens 
were known to the herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, we must search and shall find them under such names 
as Muscus, Lithobryon, or rock-moss; and Dendrobryon, that is, 
tree-moss. 
Tournefort, a French botanist and a native of Provence, was the 
first who separated them from the various dissimilar plants among 
which they had previously been confounded, and gave them the 
name Lichen. ‘This was at the close of the seventeenth century. 
The word was not a new coinage, but one which before his time 
had been used by medizval writers to designate some kinds of 
liverwort. They in their turn had borrowed the word from Greek 
authors, who meant by it some plant that grew on wet rocks. 
What it was is uncertain, as the meagre terms in which it is 
