46 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



botanically for another of our English species, though, 

 from the rare occurrence of the plant, we can hardly con- 

 clude that it was this rather than the very common species 

 that our two poets intended to introduce. 



The species represented in our illustration is botanically 

 the Lonicera Periclymenum. The generic name was 

 bestowed upon these plants by the great master of natural 

 science, Linnaeus, in honour of a fellow botanist, Adam 

 Lonicer, a German, a custom at one time very preva- 

 lent, and which is still, to a certain degree, in vogue. The 

 genera Sherardia, Frankenia, and Knautia of our English 

 flora are thus named in honour respectively of James 

 Sherard, an English botanist; of John Franken, a Swede, 

 Professor of Medicine and Botany in the University of 

 Upsal, where he died in 1661 ; and of Christopher Knaut, a 

 great Saxon botanist of the seventeenth century. Bartsia, 

 Hutchinsia, Mertensia, Sibthorpia, and many others may 

 also be met with in our lists. In some few cases 

 the name of a plant has been given to it from some 

 more or less fanciful analogy; thus the Bauhinia was so 

 called in honourable remembrance of Caspar and John 

 Bauhin, the deeply two-lobed leaves of the genus suggest- 

 ing these plants as being most appropriate to bear the fame 

 of the two brothers to posterity. Though all the examples 

 given hitherto have been of a pleasant nature, there are 

 some, though these are happily few in number, in which 

 a little malice has been exercised in the choice of a name, 

 but of these we need give but one illustration. The 

 Hernandia was thus called from a man whose botanical 

 pretensions at one time placed him in a position of con- 

 siderable pecuniary responsibility, but whose discoveries 

 were by no means an equivalent for the support afforded 



