Among the difficulties that waylay the beginner must be reckoned the botanical phraseology. We have heard of "the language of flowers," and of its romantic associations; but the language of botany is another matter, and though less picturesque is equally cryptic and not to be mastered without study.
When, for example, we read of a certain umbelliferous plant that its "cremocarp consists of two semicircular-ovoid mericarps, constricted at the commissure"—or when, with our lives in our hands, so to speak, we experiment in fungus-eating, and learn that a particular mushroom has its stem "fistulose, subsquamulose, its pileus membranaceous, rarely subcarnose, when young ovato-conic, then campanulate, at length torn and revolute, deliquescent, and clothed with the flocculose fragments of the veil"—we probably feel that some further information would be welcome.
A friend who had been reading a series of articles on botany once remarked to me that "they could scarcely be said to be written in any known language, but were in a new tongue which might perhaps be called Botanesque."
But it is of the botanesque nomenclature that I now wish to speak. The faculty of bestowing appropriate names is at all times a gift, an inspiration, most happy when least laboured, and often eluding the efforts of learned and scientific men. By schoolboys it is sometimes exhibited in perfection; as in a case that I remember at a public school, where three brothers of the name of Berry were severally known, for personal reasons, as Bilberry, Blackberry, and Gooseberry, the fitness of which botanical titles was never for a moment impugned.
But botanists rarely invent names so well. The nomenclature of plants, like that of those celestial flowers, the stars, is a queer jumble of ancient and modern, classical learning and mediæval folk-lore, in which the really characteristic features are often overlooked. In this respect the Latin names are worse offenders than the English; and one is sometimes tempted, in disgust at their pedantic irrelevance, to ignore them altogether, and to exclaim with the poet:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
But this would be an error; for a name does greatly enhance the interest of an object, be it boy, or bird, or flower; and the Greek and Latin plant-names, cumbrous and far-fetched though many of them are—as when the saintfoin is absurdly labelled onobrychis, on the supposition that its scent provokes an ass to bray—form, nevertheless, a useful link between botanists of different nations and a safeguard against the confusion that arises from a variety of local terms.
Among the English names also there are some clumsy appellations, and in a few cases the Latin ones are much pleasanter: stellaria, for example, as I have already said, is more elegant than "stitchwort." "What have I done?" asks the small cousin of the woodruff, in Edward Carpenter's poem, when it justly protests against its hideous christening by man:
What have I done? Man came,
Evolutional upstart one,
With the gift of giving a name
To everything under the sun.
What have I done? Man came
(They say nothing sticks like dirt),
Looked at me with eyes of blame,
And called me "Squinancy-wort."
But on the whole the English names of flowers are simpler and more suggestive than the Latin; certainly "monk's-hood" is preferable to aconitum, "rest-harrow" to ononis, "flowering rush" to butomus; and so on, through a long list: and it therefore seems rather strange that the native titles should sometimes be ousted by the foreign. I have met botanists who had quite forgotten the English, and were obliged to ask me for the scientific term before they could sufficiently recall the plant of which we were speaking.