128 ENGLISH BOTANY. 
The origin of the common name of this plant has given rise to many conjectures 
and curious statements. In nearly all places where it occurs, it is known by some 
name, referring to its finger-like, glove-like, or thimble-like blossom, that 
" Rears its pyramid of bells 
Gloriously freckled, purpled and white." 
Dr. Prior, whose authority is great in the origin of popular names, says : " Foxglove 
is a name so inappropriate to the plant, that many explanations of it have been 
attempted, by which it might appear to mean something different from the 
glove of a fox. Its Norwegian name, Revhielde, fox bell, is the only foreign one 
that alludes to that animal. We get no help or light on the subject from any other of 
its foreign synonyms. Its present Latin name, Digitalis, was given to it by Facta, 
with the remark, that up to that time, 1542, there was none for it in Greek or 
Latin. In France it is called Gants de Notre Dame; in Germany Fingerhut. It 
seems most probable that the name was, in the first place, foxes glew, or music, in 
reference to the favourite instrument of an earlier time, a ring of bells hung on an 
arched support, the tintinnabulum, and thus answering to the Norwegian Revbielde." 
We cannot quite agree with Dr. Prior, for it seems quite probable that the shape of 
the flowers may have suggested the idea of a glove, and that, associated with the name 
of the botanist Fuchs, who first gave it a botanical name, may have been easily 
corrupted into Foxglove. It happens, moreover, that the name Folhsglove is a very 
ancient one, and exists in a list of plants as old as the time of Edward III. The 
"folks" of our ancestors were the " fairies," and nothing was more likely than that 
the pretty coloured bells of the plant would be designated " Folhsgloves" afterwards 
" Foxglove." In Wales it is still declared to be a favourite lurking-place of the 
fairies, who are said to oocasion the snapping sound made when children, holding one 
end of the digitalis bell, suddenly strike the other on the hand to hear the clap of 
fairy thunder, with which the indignant fairy makes her escape from her injured 
retreat. In the South of Scotland it is called "bloody fingers," more northward 
"deadman's bells;" whilst in Wales it is known as " fairy-i'olks-fingers, or "lambs- 
tongue-leaves." Poets have not forgotten to honour the beauty of this stately plant 
in their rhymes, and the characteristic manner in which the blossoms fall off one by 
one, apparently in their full bloom and freshness, commencing at the lowest and 
gradually mounting to the highest, is mentioned by Wordsworth :— 
" Through quaint obliquities I might pursue 
These cravings ; when the Foxglove one by one 
Upwards through every stage of the tall stem 
Had shed beside the public way its bells, 
And stood of all dismantled, save the last, 
Left at the tapering ladder's top that seern'd 
To bend, as doth a slender blade of grass 
Tipp'd with a rain-drop." 
And again he writes — 
" The Foxglove now in crimson tresses rich 
Depends, whose freckled bells to insect tribes 
Afford a canopy of velvet bliss," 
