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Show 320 WANT AND EXCESS iedge of nature, or in applying that k~owledge, the assistance which is given, although gtvei~ w1th the ''ery best intentions, is often as much a hmd~rance as a help. The greatest hinderance of all JS the want of a popular language. Th~ sp~cie_s ?f _plants that have been discovered as nat1ve 1n Bntam, and on the shores of the British seas, amount to nearly four thousand. The half of these have not English names; and of those that have, the names are mostly local and do not find a place in the mother language of the country. The vast number of foreign p~~nts which have been introduced have of course no English names, as it has not been the fashio~1 with our botanists to Anglicise the learned names, m the way that they have been Gallicised by the French. Thus the people of different countries, and often of different parts of the same country, are unable to converse about the greater number of the plants, unless they shall first make themselves masters of the technical language of botany, and that_ can only be done by a very limited number. Even 111 that there is more difficulty than there should be ; for the plants have so manY: nam~s and syn~nymes, that if the whole were wntten In alphabetical order, the number of species would appear to be almost forty thousand ; yet all these names occur in the books, so that they who read for a knowledge of plants must know what they all stand for; and thus the nomenclature of botany is nearly ten languages. The names, too, are such that a comm_on English reader cam1ot attach a particular meamng to any one of them, and there are many to which no reader can attach any meaning, although he were master of all the languages that are spoken, or ever \Vere spoken under the canopy of heaven, because they are "made-up names," and have no reference to any thing discoverab~e about the plant. As a specimen, we may mentwn a few of the names of the OF NAJ.\IES. 327 lichen which was mentioned before, as furnishing the bloom-die called cudbear. They are, Lichenoides crustaceum et l n·ll . . R .. 1 emus, m au. leprosum, q-c. . .... Lichen tartareus . . . . . L' Lichen saxorum . . . • . mnams. Verrucaria tartarea . . . } Parmelia tartarea . . . . Acharius. tartarea ... . Rhinodina tarlarea . .. . There are seven names, two of them given by the one author, and four by another, an~ these too not the specific but the generic part of the names; and if the first one were not, if quoted, a description and not a name, it is the most expressive of the whole. Perhaps that abundance of nomenclature may have facilitated the progress of the knowledge of plants among professional botanists; but in a popular point of view it has been the reverse; because nobody who has not leisure to learn all those names, or who is not daily occupied on the subject, so as not to forget them, can possibly obtain a knowledge of the p}ants themselves-to say nothing of their habits; and though one had ever so much capacity, it is not possible, without contriving a set of new names, and making them English, and generally known and used (which is also an impossibility), to write any thing popular upon the subject to help be. ginners. The case of animals is not quite so bad, because, to most people, there is more excitement about animals than about plants. There are many people in towns who do not know the name of a single vegetable- or, which comes to the same thing, cannot name the vegetable if they were to see it, or find it out among others by its name,-unless they are vegetables which they have seen in the markets |