THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
19 
our American species), yellow cinquefoils and white bedstraws, 
speedwells with blossoms nearly half an inch across, a blue-flow- 
ered polygala and the pigmy eyebright. 
One of the oddest of the wayside plants is a small grass, some- 
times only two or three inches high, which botanists call Brisa 
media. It bears its flowers in comparatively large, panicled 
spikes, which are sensitive to the slightest breeze and conse- 
quently are almost always trembling as they hang. This pecu- 
liarity has, of course, attracted the attention of the country people, 
who in England, are rather more observant of plants than those 
in a similar walk of life in America, and the little plant goes by 
half a hundred different names in the various counties of the 
kingdom. Thus it is known as doddergrass, doddering dickies, 
earthquakes, shivering Jenny, wiggle-waggles and quakers — the 
last perhaps the most common. 
A word may be said in relation to the trees. The characteris- 
tic British oak, in fact the only species that is really native, is the 
one known to botanists as Qiiercus Robur. It is a noble tree, 
akin to our white oak, and one does not wonder that among the 
primitive Celts and Teutons it was set apart as sacred to the great- 
est of their gods. Scarcely less beautiful is the British ash 
(Fraxinus excelsior), which seems of a rather statelier habit than 
the American species. Like the oak, the ash is associated with 
many an old world superstition. Readers of Norse mythology 
will recollect the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil, which bound the earth 
to heaven and to the underworld, and that it was from an ash and 
an elm that the first man and woman are said to have been created. 
The elm is one of the characteristic trees of W arwickshire, where 
the roads are often lined with magnificent specimens of it — not 
the American elm, however, but Ulmus campestris. A favorite 
tree in cultivated grounds and in the parks of the gentry is the 
European linden, or lime as the English often call it. It blooms in 
late Ji-fly and perfumes the air to the intoxication, doubtless, of 
every bee in the neighborhood. Another common tree of the 
wayside is what the English style the Sycamore — really a maple, 
being in fact the Acer pseiido-plataniis, which has been intro- 
