132 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



It appears to us that the earlier botanists, who ordinarily 

 studied plants from a medicinal point of view, and were 

 commonly at least as much at home in animal as in 

 vegetable physiology, were struck by this resemblance of 

 the stems of the stitch wort to the articulations of the bones, 

 in the human hand for instance, and in all seriousness 

 regarded Jioloatea as a very fairly descriptive specific affix. 



The stitch wort may very commonly be met with in woods 

 and damp hedgerows. It attains to the height of eighteen 

 inches to two feet, and from the profusion and brilliant 

 whiteness of its starry flowers, is very readily noticed. It is 

 a perennial, and flowers in the spring and early summer ; 

 its companions, therefore, are the primrose, the hyacinth, 

 the wood anemone, and the orchis, and it will ordinarily 

 be found with them by the lover of nature as he rambles 

 through the coppice in May. We are unable to say with 

 certainty why it should have received its familiar name ; 

 possibly because, at a time when almost all plants were held 

 to have healing virtues, it may have been regarded as an 

 antidote for stitch, or catching of the breath. 



