0 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[October S. 
had any knowledge of, you might teach a child in three 
lessons to learn to distinguish a plant of that natural 
assemblage of species from the rest of the plant creation. 
Michaelmas daisy, dahlia, French marigold, China aster, 
coreopsis, sanvitalia, and cineraria, with artichokes, 
thistles and dandelions, are each and all of them com¬ 
pound flowers like the daisy; and no one who knew 
these, or even only one or two of them, could ever mis¬ 
take a compound flower—a Daisy-wort as we call it— 
from other flowers. Unless when any of them are what 
we call double, most of them have the hull’s eye centre, 
common to the daisy. It is true that some of them—as, 
for instance, the thistles—want the hull’s eye; hut still 
there is a collection of little flowers in every one of them 
which make up one individual flower. If you were to 
take a single or a double dahlia and pull it gently to 
pieces, it would reveal a secret. Every little piece or 
quill (or floret, as the learned term it) woidd he found 
to be a perfect flower of itself, having its own stamens 
and pistils, pollen and all, as perfect as a tulip. There¬ 
fore, one dahlia must he a compound flower made up of 
these little florets, and it is just the same with the thou¬ 
sands of plants which compose the compound order of 
plants. 
Now, if I was writing about some new plant, which 
no one in England had ever seen before, and were to 
say that it was a composite plant—which is a better 
word than compound plant—every reader who knew a 
daisy would know at once what kind of flower this new 
plant must have, which, of course, would he a great 
assistance to the memory in minding the name of it. 
But whether this new plant, or rather flower, had a 
hull’s eye centre like a single dahlia, or had the centre 
filled up like a Scotch thistle, could not be made out 
from the word composite —-the English name of the 
oi'der. Here, then, is a loose screw. We know the 
new composite plant is a compound flower, but whether 
or not it looks like a China aster, or a French marigold, 
or a thistle, who can tell? Now, to make the whole 
clear enough to a new beginner, or an old practitioner, 
botanists have divided large orders of plants, of which 
this composite order is one of the largest, into separate 
parcels. Every plant in each parcel will, therefore, 
show its flowers very much like the rest of the plants in 
that parcel. It follows, then, that in writing about this 
new plant I ought to say what parcel it belonged to, as 
well as that it was a composite plant. Now all this will 
be done in the new dictionary, and very simply too. 
Let us take an instance, and suppose that a friend 
has just returned from California with gold enough to 
pay the interest of the national debt, and a hatful of new 
plants, which he shows to a clever botanist, who finds 
one new plant amongst them which was never named 
before; and we shall say that this new plant had a 
beautiful flower, as yellow as gold itself, and looked as 
much like a common thistle flower as could be. The 
botanist, wishing to compliment our fortunate friend, 
offers to name this flower after the man of gold, but he 
would rather not be complimented by a yellow flower ; 
to a scarlet flower he would make no objections; but he 
saw too much of those yellow ones to have any desire 
that his name should be associated with such a crew; 
and the botanist has it all his own way—just the very 
thing he wanted—for now he has a good opportunity to 
manufacture a new name that would be expressive, 
and, after some consideration, he fixes on the name as 
the golden flower from the gold mines. If he were to put 
it into this English garb, no foreigner, who did not un¬ 
derstand our way of talking, could make out the mean¬ 
ing of the name, and that would never do ; so he must 
translate the name into some dead language—the ancient 
Greek or the Latin are the usual tongues to get hard 
names from; but, like me, he is not much of a scholar, 
and he will be content with the Latin itself this time, 
and calls the new yellow thistle-like plant Auraria auri- 
coma, and says it belongs to the same parcel of compo¬ 
site plants as the thistle, and gives a long account of it 
—in pure Latin, of course—so that all those who under¬ 
stand the verb amo may understand him too ; and if the 
new plant were to be put into our new dictionary, we 
must translate the name back again after this fashion— 
Auraria. From Auraria, a gold mine; the plant being 
from the gold mines in California. Natural Order: 
i Composites — allied to the thistle. Now the new plant 
■ turns out to be one of the compound or composite spe- 
! cies without the bull’s eye—but looking very much like 
a thistle, because it stands in the thistle alliance; and 
we have only to make out now what Auricoma means, 
and we shall be as wise as the man of orders himself 
■ who first gave it the name. Then this Auricoma means 
golden hair—from Aurum, gold ; and coma, hair. The 
•silky threds composing the flower head of a thistle being 
likened to “ a fine head of hair.” So that all this palaver 
ends at last in a “ yellow-haired laddie” from the gold 
mines of California. Yet the thing has a real and ex¬ 
pressive meaning in it, and so have all the hard names 
with which we, in our innocence, often find so many 
faults. But we are obliged to put more than this in the 
I dictionary about the same new plant, because there are 
so many to please. The learned call composite plants 
Asteracece —that is, asterworts or starworts — because 
most of these flowers look, at a distance, like so many 
stars of the different degrees of magnitude. Then, after 
the learned come the children of the mist, who, if tradi¬ 
tion be true, were exchanged in their infancy by the 
fairies for their own little sprats; they, too, must be 
humoured in the new dictionary, and nothing in the 
way of plants will go down with them but what smacks 
of Linmeus himself; so the Linnaean class and order 
are put in to suit their fancies. Then come the ways of 
sowing the seeds, or getting the plants from cuttings, 
the kind of soil best fitted for the different sorts, and 
many more things besides, which are very necessary to 
know for those who would be knowing themselves. 
Now, if it were only for the curiosity of the thing, it 
would be worth while to buy a few numbers of this new 
dictionary, and see all this for oneself; and if it is not 
thought worth three-halfpence the number, why then it 
might be given up, and penny cigars bought instead, 
and a halfpenny saved to boot. 
In ploughing up for this dictionary, it so happens that 
my worthy friend Mr. Appleby is put alongside with 
mo in the collar; and, lest some people might think 
that he kicks over the traces at times, because he once 
\ said that he thought it pedantic to teach ordinary 
\ mortals so much learning, I must say, injustice to him, 
j that a more steady puller could not be found—no, not 
in Suffolk itself; and for the rest, I can see no slackness 
: in the traces of the foremost pair, nor feel that those 
behind us allow us more than our share of the draught, 
i and I have not heard a single crack of the driver’s whip 
yet; nevertheless, it is all up-hill work. 
To return to the passionworts, and to Tacsonia : it 
stands in the dictionary thus : “ Tacsonia. From Tacso, 
the Indian name of one of the species in Peru. Natural 
Order, Passionworts (Passifloraceie). Lin. 10 — Mona- 
delphia; 2 — Pentandria. Although the Tacsonias are 
very distinct from the passion-flowers, they resemble 
them so much in habit and general appearance that a 
common observer might see little difference between 
them, except the long tube of the flowers of Tacsonia. 
They inhabit a belt or zone in Peru, immediately above 
the region of the passion-flowers, and therefore are more 
| hardy with us. The fruit of T. mollissima, and of two 
more species not yet in cultivation, are eatable. For 
propagation and culture, see Passion-flower.” Then 
follow the names of the different species, with the year 
; of introduction, native country, &c. Here, then, the 
I 
