J 86 



NATURE 



[May 9, 1918 



matters very little to himself or to the world. If 

 there is anything- of value in the man it is already 

 showing itself in the position he has attained or 

 in the quality of the work he is doing, and is due 

 to the endowment of Nature. If it cannot be said 

 that he has accomplished anything, and if it is 

 obvious that he is occupied in an inferior line of 

 work, it seems all the more to cast discredit on the 

 process by which he obtained his degree. 



W. A. T. 



ANCIENT PLANT-NAMES.'^ 



THE antiquity of plant-names needs no proof. 

 We read in Genesis how man, early in his 

 career, came to designate living things, and learn 

 the name of the tree from which he improvised his 

 first raiment. Semitic tradition is corroborated for 

 other regions by Chinese ideographs which admit 

 of comparative study and by Aryan vocables that 

 lend themselves to ethnic generalisation. 



The results of the study of ancient plant-names 

 are only satisfactory when the incidence of the 

 names is assured. But assurance is not easily 

 attained. The work calls for the exact knowledge 

 of the scholar, the historian, the ethnologist, and 

 the naturalist. The requisite combination cannot 

 always be secured. 



There are, too, certain intrinsic difficulties. 

 Names identical in significance are not always 

 applied to one plant. The tournesol of France and 

 the girasole of Italy belong to separate natural 

 families, the heliotrope ol Greece to a third. 

 Words linguistically equivalent may connote dis- 

 tinct species. The sarson of Hindustan and the 

 sarisha of Bengal are different crops, both equally 

 prevalent in either country ; the sarshaf of Persia 

 is akin to, but distinct from, each. 



The position of classical plant-names was that 

 of plant-names to-day. Theophrastus, oldest in 

 time, yet most modern in method, of Greek 

 botanists, taught his pupils that most cultivated 

 plants had names and were commonly studied, but 

 that most wild kinds were nameless, and few 

 knew about them. Yet European study of ancient 

 plant-names is mainly that of Greek ones. As 

 Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer has pointed out in 

 Whibley's "Companion to Greek Studies," the 

 Greek botanist had a name for every conspicuous 

 Greek plant, and most of these names have come 

 down to us, whereas nothing of the kind, if it 

 ever existed, has survived from the Romans. 



Renaissance students endeavoured to identify 

 the plants described by Uioscorides. Their texts 

 show great critical acumen ; their illustrations are 

 often most faithful. Yet much of their work is 

 obsolete. Their appreciation of the principles of 

 plant-distribution was imperfect. They sought in 

 Central Europe for Mediterranean species, and 

 often were in error when they felt most assured. 

 It took the European naturalist three centuries to 

 realise this; even yet the European scholar does 

 not always appreciate the situation, and standard 



1 "On Some Ancient Plant-names." III. By Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 

 K.C.M.G. /ourna/ (^P/ii/o/oj^y, vo]. xxx'iv., x>p- 290-312. 



NO. 2532, VOL. lOl] 



lexicons sometimes still remain " blind leaders of 

 the blind." Until, two years ago, Sir W. T. 

 Thiselton-Dyer gave us a compact enumeration of 

 those plants actually Greek with which it is pos- 

 sible to wed a Greek name, no scholar and no 

 naturalist in this country had any real assurance 

 as to the accuracy of any accepted identification. 



The same author has now, in the. paper cited 

 in our footnote, dealt with a special group of 

 ancient plant-names, mostly Greek. With a re- 

 stricted arable area and an extended seaboard,, 

 ancient Greece possessed an adventurous mercan- 

 tile marine. The list of Greek names for culti- 

 vated edible, officinal, and coronary plants, or for 

 wild species of economic interest was supple- 

 mented by one of names for plants or plant- 

 products imported from abroad. The resolution 

 of such exotic names is, not unnaturally, often 

 most perplexing. 



The aid this new contribution to .the subject 

 renders to the scholar and the naturalist cannot - 

 well be measured. Both can best repay their | 

 obligation by studying it with care. The space ] 

 at our disposal forbids any attempt at its analysis. 

 The account of afxwfxov and Kap8dfxwfjLov, terse yet 

 complete, carries instant conviction. The problem 

 of the Idaean vine, the solution of which by 

 Dodoens three and a half centuries ago has, as 

 the author explains, been generally overlooked, 

 amply merits restatement. But -the other sections 

 equally deserve unstinted praise. It may yet be 

 necessary to modify in detail the conclusions 

 reached regarding oTroKoiXTraaov. This cannot, 

 however, lessen the value of a note which mani- 

 festly puts the special student on the real track 

 of this elusive bane, and gives the scholar some- 

 thing better than the old lexicographic acceptance 

 of its identity with an innocent gum. The traveller 

 responsible for that self-contradictory conclusion 

 could justify it only by the assumption that Galen 

 had been misled. This note may also spare us 

 the repetition of a contrary, suggestion, less con- 

 sonant with phytogeographical considerations than 

 anything ever hazarded by a Renaissance scholar, 

 that in oTroKaXTraa-ov the ancients had somehow 

 come into contact with the West African ordeal- 

 tree. 



WATER-POWER IN GREAT BRITAIN. 

 T^HE absence of co-ordination and systematic 

 ^ control in regard to the water resources of 

 this country has frequently been alluded to in the 

 columns of N.-vture when reviewing the volumin- 

 ous reports and statistics issued by hydrological 

 departments on the Continent and in the United 

 States. It is satisfactory to observe that this re- 

 grettable indifference to a matter of urgent national 

 importance has at length become the subject of 

 comment and discussion. At a meeting of the 

 Royal Society of Arts on January 23, Mr. Alexander 

 Newlands, engineer-in-chief of the Highland 

 Railway, read a paper reviewing the water-power 

 resources of the United Kingdom (with special 

 reference to Scotland), estimating their extent andl 



