258 POPULAR NAMES 



doubt that their names are in their origin identical. How 

 they came to be attached to them both, is the difficulty. 

 Apuleius (ch. 26), speaking of chamsepitys, says, " Grseci 

 chamsepityn, Itali abigam, alii cupressum nigrani vocant." 

 Brunsfels too says of the chamsepitys (b. i. p. 161), " Ego 

 autem cipressen existimavi." The yew seems to have been 

 taken for this black cypress, and in this way to have 

 acquired the terms abiga and ajuga, and iua and iva. But 

 we learn from Parkinson (Th. Bot. p. 284) that the forget- 

 me-not, a weed of corn-fields, was " called in English 

 Ground pine, and Ground ivie, after the Latin word Iva." 

 This term Ground ivy was assigned by others to another 

 small labiate plant, (Nepeta Glechoma, B.) which was 

 formerly called Hedera terrestris, and ivy regarded as the 

 equivalent of hedera, and subsequently transferred to the 

 Hedera helix, our present Ivy. The origin of Ajuga 

 seems to have been a mere error of the copyist in tran- 

 scribing the passage from the 24th book of Pliny. For, 

 as distinct as are abiga and ajuga in our modern print, the 

 b of abiga might be written so as to look like a v or u, and 

 the word made to appear auiga, which, if the i were not 

 dotted, might be as easily read aiuga as auiga. See IVY. 

 Thus by a train of blunders, Pliny's abiga becomes ajuga, 

 and ajuga iua or iva. This abiga, (ajuga, or iua} was, as 

 Pliny tells us, the same as the Greek chamcepitys. The 

 yew-tree gets the name of chamcepitys through a remark 

 made by Apuleius, and thereby, as its synonym, that of 

 iua or iva. The ground-pine, from its terebinthinate odour, 

 also gets the name of chamcepitys, and thereby, as its 

 synonym, that of iua or iva. But from chamce- being 

 equivalent to terrestris, this name iua or iva passes over to 

 a weed called, from the shape of its leaf and creeping 

 habit, hedera terrestris, and the equivocal word hedera 

 conveys it to the shrub which thus gets the name of ivy. 



Taxus baccata, L. 



