70 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS, 



so easily satisfied as others, have endeavoured to transfer 

 the meaning from lamb's tongue to Lammas tongue. 

 Lammas was a festival held in olden times at the beginning 

 of August ; a thanksgiving for the first-fruits of the harvest, 

 and several plants owe their popular names to the fact of 

 their flowering at some special season in the mediaeval 

 calendar. Any attempt however, to thus identify our 

 present plant with Lammas is not altogether happy, as it 

 begins flowering some six weeks before this date. The 

 added word tongue, too, is meaningless in such a connexion, 

 and we can only conclude that whether the idea is in 

 harmony with our critical faculty or not, Iambus-tongue 

 in its most literal significance is what we are expected to 

 accept. Many of our plants have English names bestowed 

 by the rustic dwellers on the country side, and these vary 

 in quality from the admirably expressive to the intolerably 

 stupid, and in addition to these they have other English 

 names that no rustic ever uses, but which may be briefly 

 described as "bookish/ 5 Such a name for our present 

 species is the narrow-leaved plantain. In some old books 

 we find the plant called Costa canina, rib-wort or rib-grass, 

 evidently in allusion to the very prominent veinings on the 

 leaves, a feature that may be very clearly noted in our illus- 

 tration : a feature too, that caused it to receive the mediseval 

 name of Quinquenervia. By Lonicer, Fuchs, and some 

 others of the older botanists, the plant was called the 

 lanceola from the shape of the -leaves resembling the head 

 of a lance, a suggestion still preserved in the specific name 

 lanceolata. Another old popular name for the lamb's 

 tongue was the kemps, a word at first sight sufficiently 

 unmeaning, yet carrying within it an interesting reference. 

 The stalks of our plant are peculiarly tough and wiry, and 



