turn of the barberry family. The English name means man-like, 

 from a fancied resemblance of the forked roots of the European 

 plant to a human body. An ancient belief was that the plant had 

 animal life and would cry out when pulled from the ground. Ar- 

 butus, from the Latin arbor, a tree, is the name of a European 

 tree of the heath family to which our trailing arbutus, Epigaea 

 repens, has a slight resemblance in its leaves. 



Few of our native plants have really native names. Cohosh 

 was the Indian name for the baneberries, Actaea; black snake- 

 root, Ciniiciftiga; and blue cohosh, Caulophyllum. Hickory is 

 the Indian name for a distinctly American genus of trees; it was 

 originally pohickory. Tamarack and hackmatack are Indian 

 names for the larches, Larix, of both eastern and western Ameri- 

 ca. The only other tree for which we use an Indian name is 

 the Osage orange, named for — not by- — the Osage Indians in 

 whose part of the country it grew. Kinnikinnick, used for our 

 Cornus Amomum, is an Indian name meaning a mixture. It 

 was used for a number of barks, and so for the plants they came 

 from — smoked either alone or mixed with tobacco by the 

 Indians. A few other Indian names will be referred to later. 



Some plant names explain themselves as descriptive of the 

 plant, its time of flowering or fruiting, or its uses. Such are coral 

 root, corpse plant, dangleberry, Dutchman's breeches, everlast- 

 ing, June berry, morning glory, evening primrose, spring beauty, 

 and scores of others. 



Other plants are named for heavenly bodies as the sun- 

 flower, the scientific name, Helianthus, from the Greek Helios, 

 the sun; sundrops; heliotrope (helios, the sun and trope, a turn- 

 ing), because the plant turns to face the sun, as does the sun- 

 flower. Heliotrope was used by the Greeks for some plant dif- 

 ferent from our cultivated one which is a native of Peru and of 

 course unknown to the ancients. But in Gray's Manual the 

 namie is said to have been given because the plant flowered at 

 the summer solstice when the sun turns from its northern jour- 

 ney to the south. Moonwort (wort is Old English for root or 

 plant) is another name for the cultivated honesty or Lunaria 

 {luna, the moon), the silvery septum of the fruit, often used in 

 winter bouquets, being like the full moon. Moon fern, for the 

 Botrychiums, especially B. Lunaria, because of the crescent- 

 shaped lobes of the frond. There are numerous star flowers, as 



