INTRODUCTION. 



to which the plants were once applied. Some few are 

 descriptive ; some refer to the legends or the ceremonies of 

 the Roman Catholic Church ; some to the elegant mytho- 

 logy of the Greeks ; some to a vulgar joke. In thinking 

 over these names, and the antiquated notions that they 

 represent, we are led at every moment to recall the times 

 from which they date, to picture to ourselves the living 

 figures of our ancestors, to hear them speaking their obso- 

 lete dialect, and almost to make the weeds that shadow 

 their grave tell more than their tombstone of its sleeping 

 inhabitants. 



The terms with which we have to deal may for con- 

 venience be referred to two groups, as Germanic, or 

 Romanic. To the former belong such as are of Anglo- 

 Saxon, German, or Low German, or Scandinavian origin, 

 and to the latter such as are French, or derived from 

 other forms of debased Latin, including a few adopted into 

 it from the Arabic. When a word falls within the first 

 group, we find great assistance in Dr. Bosworth's and 

 J. Jamieson's Dictionaries, and in the works of Adelung, 

 Bopp, Pott, Diefenbach, and the brothers Grimm, and in 

 those of the Frisian and Scandinavian writers. French 

 words, from the loss of those Celtic dialects with which 

 the Latin element of the language was corrupted, and the 

 extreme degree of debasement to which it has arrived, are 

 of much more difficult analysis. For these we have the 

 assistance of Diez's Worterbuch der romanischen Sprachen, 

 and Scheler's Dictionnaire d'Etymologie Franchise, and the 



