CORRESPONDENCE. 
Editor of the American Naturalist. 
Sir :— Several articles have appeared in the American Naturalist 
of late on the common names of animals, and one of them introduces 
the question of their etymology. “ There is in the human mind,” as 
Max Müller sagely observes, “a craving after etymology, a wish to 
find out why such a thing should be called by such a name”; and 
this applies emphatically in the case of popular names in natural 
history. | 
Perhaps the most striking feature in the historical development of 
plant and animal vocabularies is the extent to which words have 
become metamorphosed, mutilated, deformed, or corrupted at the 
hands of the people, not only in English, but in all languages. One 
cannot but be impressed with the many curious travesties of the 
names of plants, insects, crustaceans, fishes, and higher animals 
which constitute a sort of verbal pathology, or “folk-etymology.” 
There has been published recently a little essay on popular ety- 
mologies, which devotes considerable attention to instances of the 
latter description, and is sufficiently accurate to recommend itself 
to naturalists. We refer to Zhe Folk and their Word-Lore, by 
A. Smythe Palmer (London, 1904), this being a companion work to 
the same author's Fo/k-Etymology. 
Everyone is familiar with such typical examples of folk-etymology 
as “sparrow-grass,” “cowcumber,” and * shoe-mach," which are the 
popular recasting of familiar plant-names; but the majority of per- 
sons are probably unaware of the close verbal affinities existing 
between such words as lobster and locust, beaver and viper, croco- 
dile and cockatrice, alligator and lizard, eagle-wood and alc, and 
numerous other co-derivatives whose communal origin is more or 
less masked. When we read in old works, for instance, that *long 
oysters are a sort of crayfish,” we do not immediately perceive that 
the latter word is only a modern modification of the older crevish 
(also written crevis and crevice), which in turn is derived from the 
same form that has yielded the French écrevisse, old-high German 
Chrebiz, and modern German Krebs; nor does the word “long 
oyster ” or *longoister " resolve itself at first sight into an anglicized 
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