HABITS AND LATIN NAMES OF BRITISH PLANTS. 
309 
and is elegantly alluded to by Felicia Hemans in her Dial of Flowers, for an 
extract of which see Baxter’s Flowering Plants ; in which is also an account of 
the delicacy of the structure and elaborate formation of fjthis elegant little plant. 
Small birds are fond of the seeds. Sir J. E. Smith remarks that it is very rarely 
found of a brilliant white. 
Anagallis tenella , Purple flowered Moneywort, Bog Pimpernel.—It yields to 
none of our wild plants in elegance, and, being scarcely known on the Continent 
except in the south, is a welcome present to German, Swiss, and Swedish 
botanists. In Withering are the following appropriate lines— 
“ Of fairer form and brighter hue 
Than many a flower that drinks the dew 
Amid the garden’s brilliant show.” 
Anchusa. — From ay^u, to strangle, on account of its astringent qualities, or 
from otyxpvaa., paint, the roots of one species, A. tinctoria , yielding a red dye 
formerly used to stain the face, and for other purposes. 
Anchusa sempervirens , Evergreen Alkanet.—This is one of our prettiest native 
plants, and well deserves a place in the flower garden. Dr. Withering observes 
that the Alkanet-roots produced in England are very inferior for yielding a fine 
red colour to those of A. tinctoria grown in the Levant. The cortical parts only 
give the dye. 
Andromeda. —From the constellation so called ; these plants prevailing in 
northern latitudes; or rather, perhaps, from a fanciful allusion to the fate of the 
princess of that name, whose beauty was doomed to pine on a desolate rock, 
surrounded by the monsters of the ocean; as her vegetable prototype hangs its 
drooping head, suffused with blushes, while possessing in solitude the turfy 
hillock, in the midst of swamps and loathsome reptiles. 
Andromeda polifolia, Marsh Andromeda.—An elegant evergreen shrub, scarcely 
a span high, whose rose-coloured drooping flowers are a good deal concealed among 
the terminal leaves. A very interesting account of this charming plant is given 
in Linnaeus’s Lapland Tour, l ., 188. See also Hooker, Scot., 126. 
Woodside, near Liverpool, 
Feb. 7, 1838. 
(To be continued.) 
VOL. III.—-NO. XXI. 
2 T 
