DERIVATION OF AMELLUS 131 
from the Celtic roots moe/= rounded hill and dun = fort ; like 
Meldon and perhaps Maldon in Great Britain. Perhaps all the other 
cities are from svoe/ also, and were hill-towns. The Ame//a was 
a river from the hills ; but its name may have had a more special- 
ized origin; it may have been the name of some neighboring 
rounded hill, and may have been fortuitously shifted to the river 
near; a kind of transfer very common when people become heirs 
to the local names of an earlier race; as the Genesee, = beautiful 
valley, applied by the Indians to a flood-plain, by the whites to 
the river beside it. 
Was the Plant-name Amellus also a Survival from an Earlier 
Race ?—The plant Camomile in its Greek form is commonly inter- 
preted as meaning ground-apple, and as due to the apple-like smell 
of the flowers. I have long wondered if that is not a later sophis- 
tication, and if -yyiov in this word, -vzl/a in its Latin equivalent, 
did not reaily represent some earlier generalized name for a small 
bushy plant. If so Amel/us may have been the same word with- 
out modifying prefix. Recently I find that over four hundred years 
ago, Hermolaus Barbarus, first great Italian commentator on the 
natural history of the ancients, had anticipated me in expressing, 
in part, the same idea, suggesting that the names Ame/lus and 
Camomilla are of the same source, and as he would surmise, per- 
haps of the same plant. While not agreeing with him in the last 
particular, there seems good ground for following up the first sug- 
gestion, even though it received the scorn of Wedel, who called it 
“ Peculiaris opinio.”” There are also two other occurrences of the 
name mel/a that need explanation; Sibthorp found it used in 
Arcadia for the mistletoe ; and as far back as about 600 A.D. 
Isidore of Seville, first Gothic writer on plants, mentions Mella as 
a name for the Lotus or Aegyptian bean, and Malomellus for some 
plant unknown. 
Was the Plant-name Amellus Derived from Mel, Honey ?—* Am- 
ellus, a flower visited by bees,” says Fee. Vergil and Columella 
both speak of the flower as an important source of food to bees. 
Did Amellus mean to Vergil the koney-flower, strangely connect- 
ing with the call of pedi, honey, cried in the streets of Athens 
to-day by honey venders from Hymettus ? 
That this was the origin of the name was evidently the belief 
