II 
SPRING 
4i 
Galanthus nivalis to be the common snowdrop, 
even if they did not understand English, and 
you were unable to tell them it was a Perce- 
neige or Schnee-glockchen , the familiar names 
in their own languages. I once had a striking 
instance of this world-wide use of the Latin 
names. I was travelling in a steamer from 
Finland to Sweden, and most of the passengers 
belonged to one of those countries or to Russia, 
and no one on board could talk English, and 
many no language at all that I was able to 
speak. It happened that our ship was put in 
quarantine because she had come from Russia, 
where the cholera was very bad, and we were 
kept at some distance from Stockholm, near a 
small island on which a temporary hospital was 
being built. By some special luck the doctor 
allowed us to land and take a walk on the 
island, while most of the other poor passengers 
could not leave the ship. I brought back with 
me a bunch of wild flowers—heather, milkwort, 
and many other common things, and gave 
them to some of our less fortunate fellow- 
travellers, and I soon found I could have quite 
a conversation with a Finnish lady, as she knew 
all the Latin names, and we settled what variety 
of Erica and Polygala they were, and spoke 
of them each in turn by name, although I did 
not know a word of her language. 
