X INTRODUCTION. 



opportunity of learning Greek and Latin, or have forgotten 

 it, and who will prefer to call a plant by a name that they 

 can pronounce and recollect. We need but to ask our- 

 selves, what success would have attended the exertions 

 of the late excellent and benevolent Professor Henslow 

 among the little pupils of 'his village school, if he had 

 used any names but the popular ones. 



Besides, admitting to the full all that can be urged 

 against them from a purely botanical point of view, 

 we still may derive both pleasure and instruction from 

 tracing them back to their origin, and reading in 

 them the habits and opinions of former ages. In 

 following up such an analysis we soon find that we are 

 travelling far away from the humble occupation of the 

 herbalist, and are entering upon a higher region of lite- 

 rature, the history of man's progress, and the gradual 

 development of his civilization. Some of the plants that 

 were familiar to our ancestors in Central Asia, bear with 

 us to this day the very names they bore there, and as 

 distinctly intimate by them the uses to which they were 

 applied, and the degree of culture which prevailed where 

 they were given, as do those of the domestic affinities the 

 various occupations of the primeval family. The names of 

 animals, with which many are compounded, carry us still 

 further back, or to still more distant regions ; for in some 

 cases it is impossible now to deduce any meaning from 

 them at all, and it is probable that these names may have 

 been adopted, with the knowledge of the animal, from an 



