Plant Names 
2 93 
of the Deity. Our Lady’s Flowers are many and 
interesting; my daughter wrote a series of articles 
for the New York Evening Post on Our Lady’s 
Flowers, and the list swelled to a surprising num- 
ber. The devil and witches have their shares of 
flowers, as have the fairies. 
I have always regretted deeply that our botanists 
neglected an opportunity of great enrichment in 
plant nomenclature when they ignored the Indian 
names of our native plants, shrubs, and trees. The 
first names given these plants were not always 
planned by botanists ; they were more often invented 
in loving memory of English plants, or sometimes 
from a fancied resemblance to those plants. They 
did give the wonderfully descriptive name of Moc- 
casin-flower to that creature of the wild-woods ; and 
a far more appropriate title it is than Lady’s-slipper, 
but it is not as well known. I have never found the 
Lady’s-slipper as beautiful a flower as do nearly all 
my friends, as did my father and mother, and I 
was pleased at Ruskin’s sharp comment that such a 
slipper was only fit for very gouty old toes. 
Pappoose-root utilizes another Indian word. Very 
few Indian plant names were adopted by the white 
men, fewer still have been adopted by the scientists. 
The Catalpa speciosa (Catalpa) ; the Zea mays 
(Maize); and Yucca jilamentosa (Yucca), are the 
only ones I know. Chinkapin, Cohosh, Hackma- 
tack, Kinnikinnik, Tamarack, Persimmon, Tupelo, 
Squash, Puccoon, Pipsissewa, Musquash, Pecan, 
the Scuppernong and Catawba grapes, are our only 
well-known Indian plant names that survive. Of 
