Verrucaria tartarea 

 Parmelia tartarea . 



tartarea . . . . i 

 Rhinodina tartarea . . . } 



OF NAMES. 353 



>Acharius. 



There are seven names, two of them given by 

 the one author, and four by another, and these 

 too not the specific but the generic part of the 

 names ; and if the first one were not, if quoted, a 

 description and not a name, it is the most expres- 

 sive of the whole. Perhaps that abundance of 

 nomenclature may have facilitated the progress of 

 the knowledge of plants among professional bota- 

 nists ; but in a popular point of view it has been 

 the reverse ; because nobody who has not leisure to 

 learn all those names, or, who is not daily occupied 

 on the subject, so as not to forget them, can possibly 

 obtain a knowledge of the plants themselves to 

 say nothing of their habits ; and though one had 

 ever so much capacity, it is not possible, without 

 contriving a new set of names, and making them 

 English, and generally known and used, (which 

 also is an impossibility) to write any thing popu- 

 lar upon the subject to help beginners. 



The case of animals is not quite so bad, be- 

 cause, to most people, there is more excitement 

 about animals than about plants. There are many 

 people in towns, who do not know the name of a 

 single vegetable or, which comes to the same 

 thing, cannot name the vegetable if they were to 

 see it, or find it out among others by its name, 

 unless they are vegetables which they have seen 

 in the markets ; and of many of these they have 

 no notion, except in the state in which they 

 appear at market or afterwards. There are, in 



Hh3 



