STUDIES IN NATURE 



neighbours, their occupations and the names of 

 their houses. But, perhaps, someone will say, 

 this may be useful to us, but it is not very 

 interesting. When we have got a list of all 

 these names we don't know anything more 

 about the country or what it is like. People 

 are very apt to forget that every name has a 

 meaning, and was given for some particular 

 reason. We cannot, it is true, always at once 

 understand the meaning, or find out the reason 

 it was given, because names, like all other words, 

 get altered as they are used by generations of 

 men. This was especially the case in the days 

 before reading and writing were much studied, 

 and printed books, papers, and maps were rarely 

 to be seen. Moreover, other languages besides 

 English have been and are spoken in the 

 British Isles, and some of the names of places 

 belong to languages which are foreign to us. 

 In this case again, it is we who are at a loss, 

 not the names that have nothing to tell us. 



We ourselves often give names to the places 

 around us when they have not any, or we do 

 not know what they are, in just the same way 

 that our forefathers gave to villages, towns, and 

 rivers the names which we still use. We speak 

 of Thompson's Lane, Haigh's Corner, the Ash- 

 field, the Red River, the Church Farm, the Bull 

 Coppice, by which we mean the lane to or past 

 Thompson's house, the corner near Mr. Haigh, 

 the field where the ash tree is, the river where 



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