JANUARY 15 



me-not meant a totally different plant from the blue-eyed 

 favourite which answers to that name now. It was 

 applied to the yellow bugle or ground-pine (Ajuga cha- 

 tncepitis), a common herb on the Continent, but only 

 found in the southern and eastern counties of England. 

 It was so called because its taste is so nasty ; it is sure to 

 be remembered by anybody who puts it in his mouth. 

 Gray was the last botanical writer to call this Ajuga 

 forget-me-not, in his Natural Arrangement, published in 

 1820 ; shortly after which time a pretty poem appeared (I 

 am ashamed to say that I have forgotten the author), 

 describing the death of a lover who had swum a river to 

 get the blue flowers for his sweetheart, and perished on 

 returning, flinging the flowers to her with the injunction 

 ' Forget me not ! ' The name stuck. The little flower 

 that had hitherto been known in English as mouse-ear 

 (Myosotis\ from a fanciful resemblance of its leaves to a 

 field-mouse's ear, and as scorpion-grass, from an equally 

 imaginative likeness of the curled flower-spike to a 

 scorpion's tail, became known all the world over as 

 Forget-me-not. 



VI 



One hundred and fifty years ago it was easy to get out 

 of the beaten track, and to encounter ' wonders ' The pouched 

 at every turn ; but now he who would experi- Mole - 

 ence the thrill of excitement which the navigators of the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries enjoyed in explor- 

 ing new lands, meeting unfamiliar creatures, and tasting 

 novel fruits, must apply himself to a small segment of the 

 animal or vegetable kingdom, and by means of the micro- 



