i68 



The Irish Nahiralist. 



September, 



the collector of native plant names. Animals are usually 

 mobile, while plants are fixed, so that your peasant infor- 

 mant may far more readily be confronted with the subject 

 of your inquiry when it is a plant than when it is an animal. 



In the hope that some readers of the Irish Naturalist may 

 be induced by Dr. Scharff's papers to take up this most 

 necessary field work I venture to set out here some of the 

 precautions to be taken. In the first place, select as your 

 informant a country man or woman who has no tincture of 

 literature ; otherwise, you may find yourself put off with 

 book -names instead of folk -names. Next, be sure that 

 your informant has been reared, or if possible bom and 

 reared, in the district where you are working. More than 

 once I have filled a page of my note-book with interesting 

 plant names only to find when I had finished that my infor- 

 mant was an immigrant from a distant county who had 

 carried with him his county plant names. Again, never 

 accept a name as fully ascertained unless given to you in 

 the presence of the animal named. In all cases get con- 

 firmation of the name from several authorities in the dis- 

 trict, checking your first result by inquiring not for the 

 name of the animal, but for the animal corresponding to 

 the name already obtained. Finally, where the name 

 appears to be obscure as to sound or meaning or both take 

 down carefully in phonetic rendering the name or names 

 given by each of your informants. From one or other of 

 these forms, or, perhaps, from a dialectic form found to 

 prevail in some other and far removed district, a ray of 

 light will often glimmer through what at first may have 

 seemed impenetrable darkness. Your knowledge of spoken 

 Irish may be slender, but this need not deter you from 

 taking up the work, though it should impress upon you the 

 necessity for caution. As old Thomas Fuller said when he set 

 out to write an account of Wales, a country which he had 

 never seen, "it matters not how meanly skilled a WTiter is so 

 long as he hath knowing and communicative friends." So if 

 you are more at home in zoology than in modern Irish you 

 will no doubt find some friendly hand to help you over the 

 linguistic stiles which are certain to obstruct your path. 



