THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 37 



at most gave them only the name by which they were known 

 in their own immediate vicinity. A dozen names were often 

 given to the same plant, and the same name to a dozen plants. 

 The confusion resulting from this arbitrary bestowal of names can be 

 imagined. When a recipe travelled into a new locality it was no 

 longer known what plants composed it. Everybody substituted in 

 the mixture or ointment, as the case might be, another plant 

 after his own fancy, but, to keep up the sale of it, gave it the same 

 name, so that in a short time all trace of the original plant was lost. 

 A relic ot this barbarism remains even to this day in the numerous 

 cases we have of the same common name applied to plants the most 

 diverse, a notable instance of which exists in the term Mayflower, 

 affixed to at least half a dozen different plants in as many different 

 orders. For example, the Trailing Arbutus (Epigcea repens), the 

 Spring-Beauty (Clayiojiia Virginica), and the June-Berry ( Amelan- 

 chier Canadensis), are all known by this title in different localities, a 

 fact which has led to no little disputation in the effort to establish 

 what plant was originally so called by the New England Loyalists, 

 Probably, at this period, some good observations, which deserved not 

 to have been forgotten, were made, but, amid such a chaos of 

 nomenclature, those who made them had no possible means of 

 communicating or recording them in a recognizable style. The 

 result was that there followed endless disputes upon words and 

 names, every useful enquiry and description being lost for want of 

 the disputants being able to decide what plant each observer had 

 really referred to. 



Not content with such a mixing of names and terms, thtse 

 earliest botanists, or more properly herbalists, drew largely on their 

 imagination for properties in plants, or greatly exaggerated any 

 slight virtue they actually possessed. Their object in this was, 

 most likely, the filling of their pockets at the expense of their dupes, 

 for quacks existed in those days as well as in our own. However, be 

 their reason what it might, the fact remains that, through such 

 deceptions, many marvellous beliefs about plants arose and were 

 handed down. Most of these, viewed in the light of modern philos- 

 ophy, are truly laughable. Thus, Xanthius, the historian, tells us 

 that a man killed by a dragon can be restored to life by a herb, 

 which he calls balin, and Democritus gravely asserts that there is a 

 plant, the juice of which applied to a wedge will cause it to 



