ON ANEMONES 3 



applied as freely to spots of various shape as it was 

 to square markings. A red flower with any kind of 

 white markings might easily be tl purple chequered with 

 white" in Shakespeare's time. 



The Adonis Flower of his day was certainly the 

 Anemone note Ross's statement in 1647 that "Adonis 

 was turned into a red flower called Anemone." 



The Anemone is the flower of the wind. The name 

 comes from the Greek anemos wind. What was the 

 Greek idea? Pliny says that the plant was so named 

 because " the flower hath the propertie to open but 

 when the wind doth blow " ; but as this does not con- 

 form to the habit of the Anemone, it can only be supposed 

 that he had some other flower in mind. Our Anemone 

 became the Windflower because several species inhabited 

 exposed, wind-swept places. 



That the early classical writers had another Anemone 

 than ours is shown by Sir William Jones's lines : 



" Youth, like a thin Anemone, displays 

 His silken leaf, and in a morn decays." 



The modern Anemone is not a fleeting (fugacious) flower, 

 and this figure could not be used correctly in reference 

 to it. 



We have anglicised the name by adopting an accen- 

 tuation of our own. We ought to make it An-e-mo'-ne ; 

 we make it A-nem'-o-ne. It is interesting to note that the 

 scansion of the lines quoted above point to our method 

 of pronunciation being held in the days of the old 

 poet, but it is possible that he introduced an arbitrary 

 pronunciation for the sake of his metre. 



The Windflower has its popular names. There is 

 the " Poppy " Anemone (coronaria), and there is the 

 " Star " Anemone (hortensis). These represent two 



