Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NAMES OF FLOWERS PEOPLE who are not gardeners often complain that the names of unfamiliar flowers are apt to be ugly, inappropriate, and difficult to remember. A beautiful pink trumpet-shaped blossom catches their eye and they ask you the name of it. When you tell them Incarvillea Delavayi, they are not satisfied.1 They demand an English name, a name appropriate to its beauties, and one that will call them to mind by its mere look and sound; a name, in fact, like daffodil or honeysuckle. They forget, or they do not know, that all flowers, even those which have the prettiest fancy names, have also business names for purposes of identification, which are often no prettier and no more significant than Incarvillea Delavayi itself. Honeysuckle, for instance, when botanists talk about it, becomes Loni- cera. The buttercup is Ranunculus acris and the daisy Bellis perennis. Now honeysuckle was probably called honeysuckle in England long before it got the name of Lonicera; but newly discovered plants do not carry pretty names on collars round their necks. Names have to be invented for them for purposes of identification; names, too, that will servefor every language; and so the person who christens a new plant, whether the discoverer or another, does not usually tax his fancy much in doing so. Sometimes he does supply it with a compound descriptive word from the Greek, as in the case of the Chionodoxa, which may, perhaps, in time come to be known as Glory of the Snow or Snow-glory. But he is apt in naming it to pay a compliment to some botanical friend or to commemorate his own achievement; and thus we get names like Brugmansia and Bou- gainvillea, and Tschichatchewia, names which seem to hang like millstones round the necks of their unfortunate owners. But even these seem worse tha...