as yet, no English names whatever. They are all found in botanical works under long, clumsy, Latin appellations, very little fitted for every-day uses, just like the plants of our gardens, half of which are only known by long-winded Latin polysyllables, which timid people are afraid to pronounce. But, annoying as this is in the garden, it is still worse in the fields. What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour? Why should a strange tongue sputter its uncouth, compound syllables upon the simple weeds by the way-side? If these hard words were confined to science and big books, one would not quarrel with the roughest and most pompous of them all; but this is so far from being the case, that the evil is spreading over all the woods and meadows, until it actually perverts our common speech, and libels the helpless blossoms, turning them into so many “precieuses ridicules.” Happy is it for the rose that she was named long ago; if she had chanced to live until our day, by some prairie stream, or on some remote ocean island, she would most assuredly have been called Tom, Dick, or Harry, in Greek or Latin.
Before people were overflowing with science—at a time when there was some simplicity left in the world, the flowers received much better treatment in this way. Pretty, natural names were given them in olden times, as though they had been called over by some rural party—cherry-cheeked maidens, and merry-hearted lads—gone a-Maying, of a pleasant spring morning. Many of those old names were thoroughly homely and rustic, such as the ox-eye, crow-foot, cowslip, butter-cup, pudding-grass, which grew in every meadow; then there was the hare-bell, which loved to hang its light blue bells about the haunts of the timid hare; the
