In My Vicarage Garden 



not, though he kept them as domestic pets animi 

 voluptatisgue causa. I fear we must now look 

 upon the great bustard as a lost English bird, 

 though it has been fairly abundant in some parts 

 within the memory of man, but with that excep- 

 tion I believe we have all the wild birds that our 

 old British ancestors had, and that the birds we 

 now have are identical in every respect with the 

 birds of the first century. This is rather curiously 

 shown to us by the names of our birds, which 

 also show that our forefathers must have been 

 good observers at least, good enough to name 

 the birds they saw. For nearly all of our bird- 

 names are not only very old names, but they rank 

 among the oldest words of the language; they 

 are old British names, very little influenced by the 

 names of the same birds that were familiar to the 

 Roman colonists of England. It is the same, too, 

 even with the insects ; they are probably exactly 

 the same with very few, if any, introductions or 

 losses ; and of the insects, too, the names are 

 very ancient. Many of our insects carry very old 

 names ; " chafer " and " butterfly," for instance, 

 occur in an eighth-century list, and " butterfly " is 

 a name for which even Dr Murray can give no 

 derivation whatever in the New Dictionary ; it 

 is a genuine British name without any foreign 

 admixture. It is the same, too, with our fishes 

 and reptiles. 



But it is time that I said something of the 

 Flora of Britain Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, 

 164 



