14 THE TERMINOLOGY OF SCIENCE 



the Australian brush turkey matches the pride of British 

 poultry-yards in stature, but has no racial affinity with 

 the bubblyjock. And so on. Now, whereas it is con- 

 ceivable that these Memories may find readers in other 

 hemispheres than our own, it is desirable, for the sake of 

 lucidity, to have recourse to the only precise terminology 

 at our disposal. But I will undertake to use these 

 terms in future as sparingly as possible, and to render 

 them as inoffensive as may be by shrouding them in 

 brackets. 



Even in our own country we are very lax in the use of 

 names for beast, bird, and flower. What bird did Chaucer 

 mean by ' the crow with voice of care ' ? Probably a rook, 

 for most people talk of rooks as crows, a term which 

 ought to be reserved for the carrion crow or the ' hoodie.' 

 Again, what flower had Milton in mind when he wrote 

 about ' the tufted crow-toe ' ? (Lycidas, i. 142). Probably 

 the birdsfoot trefoil, sometimes called crow-toes ; but in 

 Scotland the wild blue hyacinth is known as craw-taes, 

 from the fancied resemblance of the unexpanded flower- 

 thyrse to a crow's foot, and in England 'crow-foot' is a 

 common name for the buttercup. It may be said that 

 these are exceptional cases, and that there is no ambiguity 

 about familiar names of English plants. Is there not? 

 It requires but a moderate acquaintance with botanical 

 literature to be aware how easily they are transferred 

 from one flower to another. For instance, there are few 

 flower-names more popular and more widely current in 

 different languages than that of the Forget-me-not: in 

 German, Vergiss-mein-nicht ; in Danish, Kiserminde; 

 in French, Ne-m'oubliez-pas ; in Swiss, Forgat-mig-icke, 

 etc. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, forget- 



