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136 RURAL HOURS. 
as yet, no English names whatever. They are all found in botanical 
works under long, clumsy, Latin appellations, very little fitted for 
every-day uses, just like the plants of our gardens, half of which 
are only known by long-winded Latin polysyllables, which timid 
people are afraid to pronounce. But, annoying as this is in the 
garden, it is still worse in the fields. What has a dead language 
to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour ? 
Why should a strange tongue sputter its uncouth, compound 
syllables upon the simple weeds by the way-side ? If these hard 
words were confined to science and big books, one would not 
quarrel with the roughest and most pompous of them all ; but this 
is so far from being the case, that the evil is spreading over all 
the woods and meadows, until it actually perverts our common 
speech, and libels the helpless blossoms, turning them into so 
many “ precieuses ridicules.” Happy is it for the rose that she 
was named long ago ; if she had chanced to live until our day, 
by some prairie stream, or on some remote ocean island, she 
would most assuredly have been called Tom, Dick, or Harry, in 
Greek or Latin. 
Before people were overflo^ving with science — at a time when 
there was some simplicity left in the world, the flowers received 
much better treatment in this way. Pretty, natural names were 
given them in olden times, as though they had been called over 
by some rural party — cherry-cheeked maidens, and meriy-hearted 
lads — gone a-Maying, of a pleasant spring morning. Many of 
those old names were thoroughly homely and rastic, such as the 
ox-eye, crow-foot, cowslip, butter-cup, pudding-grass, which grew 
in every meadow ; then there was the hare-bell, which loved to 
hang its light blue bells about the haunts of the timid hare ; the 
