226 POPULAR NAMES 



description of the plant. " It is a lierbe of a very strange 

 nature and marvellous: for although that the Sonne do 

 shine hoate and a long time thereon, yet you shall finde it 

 alwayes moyst and bedewed, and the small heares [hairs] 

 thereof alwayes full of little droppes of water : and the 

 hoater the Sonne shineth upon this herbe, so much the 

 moystier it is, and the more bedewed, and for that cause it 

 was called Ros Soils in Latine, whiche is to say in Eng- 

 lishe, The dewe of the Sonne, or Sonnedewe." Neverthe- 

 less, the Germ, name, sindau, leads us to suspect that the 

 proper meaning of the word was " ever-dewy," from A.S. 

 O.S, and Fris. sin, ever, rather than from sun. The Latin 

 name, Ros soils, is modern, and, as the plant is seldom met 

 with in the South of Europe, is probably a mistranslation 

 of the German or English one. Drosera, L. 



SUNFLOWER, from its " resembling the radiant beams of 

 the sun," as Gerarde says ; or, as another old herbalist 

 expresses it in Latin, " idea sua exprirnens solis corpus, 

 quale a pictoribus pingitur;" and not, as some of our 

 popular poets have supposed, from, its flowers turning to 

 face the sun, which they never do ; a delusion that Thom- 

 son expresses in the lines : 



" But one, the lofty follower of the sun, 



Sad when he sets, shuts up her yellow leaves, 

 Drooping all night, and, when he warm returns, 

 Points her enamour'd bosom to his ray." 



Summer, 1. 216. 

 Helianthus annuus, L. 



also in some herbals, from its only opening in the sun- 

 shine, the rock rose, Helianthemum vulgare, Giirt. 

 in our older poets, the marigold, as in Heywood's Mar- 

 riage Triumphe : 



"The yellow marigold, the sunne's own flower." 

 " It was so named," says Hyll, " for that after the rising 

 of the sun unto noon, this flower openeth larger and larger; 



