120 PROSERPINA. 



to gather pleasant liquid and labial syllabling, round gen 

 tie meaning, in 



" Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 Will ye go, will ye go, 

 Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 To the birks of Aberf eldy ? " 



he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp final k s 

 in birk, was the remnant of a magnificent Greek effort to ex- 

 press the rending of the earth by earthquake, in the wars of the 

 giants. In the middle of that word 'esinaragese,' we get our 

 own beggar's ' rag ' for a pure root, which afterwards, through 

 the Latin frango, softens into our 'break,' and 'bark,' the 

 * broken thing ' ; that idea of its rending around the tree's 

 stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botani- 

 cal description, attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watch- 

 ing the strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, in the 

 Aberfeldys of Imaus. 



3. That this tree should have been the only one which "the 

 Aryans, coming as conquerors from the North, were able to 

 recognize in Hindostan," * and should therefore also be " the 

 only one whose name is common to Sanskrit, and to the lan- 

 guages of Europe," delighted me greatly, for two reasons : the 

 first, for its proof that in spite of the development of species, 

 the sweet gleaming of birch stem has never changed its argent 

 and sable for any unchequered heraldry ; and the second, that 

 it gave proof of a much more important fact, the keenly accu- 

 rate observation of Aryan foresters at that early date ; for the 

 fact is that the breaking of the thin -beaten silver of the birch 

 trunk is so delicate, and its smoothness so graceful, that until 

 I painted it with care, I was not altogether clear-headed my- 

 self about the way in which the chequering was done : nor 

 until Fors to-day brought me to the house of one of my father's 

 friends at Carshalton, and gave me three birch steins to look 

 at just outside the window, did I perceive it to be a primal 

 question about them, what it is that blanches that dainty 



* Lectures on the Families of Speech, by the Rev. F. Farrer, Long- 

 man, 1870. Page 81. 



