Chamæmespilus, and Ampelosicyos,
if plants can grow with the disgrace of such
names fastened to them, if such words can
represent any living thing of beauty in the
glory of creation through which we walk
daily?

It is time that we left off calling bad
names. The flowers of the field have never
injured us, we have no right to behave as if
we bore them a deep grudge, and to
overwhelm them with our scientific Billingsgate.
Neither have we any right to seal up against
children—our own blossoms—the beautiful
story of the lives of their kindred in the
gardens and the fields. He who by the sea-
shore makes friends with the sea-nettles, is
introduced to them by the scientific master
of ceremonies as the Physsophoridæ and
Hippopodydæ. Creatures weak, delicate and
beautiful, are Desmidiaceæ, Chætopterina,
and Amphinomaceæ, Pycnogonida, Tenthredineta,
Twentysyllableorfeeta, and all for the
honour of science; or rather, not for its
honour; but for its honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Almost every book of science is a stream
alive with long-jawed alligators, among which
no such small fish as a general reader dares
to swim. We declare war against these
alligators. Let them be hunted down!

It is said that a special scientific language
is required, because the words in ordinary
use are inexact. A man of science won't
know what a primrose means, and recognises
common holly only as the Ilex aquifoliurn.
Englishmen in general will never become
versed in the pleasant—and, in truth, as to
the knowledge of ascertained facts, very
simple—mysteries of nature; because the
words of the scientific are horseboluses, that
we must swallow whole or leave altogether.
A public vehicle, in every day use, may be a
cabriolet; but we, who set value on our daily
breath, economising it and time with it, say
Cab. The man of science, doubtless, if he lived
fairly up to his profession, would stand on
the pavement and shout cabrioletificitudinitatibus!
Two syllables of the word omnibus,
are rapidly collapsing into an apostrophe.
In a few years, Bus will be classical English,
and in a few more years the apostrophe will
follow. In our households, William becomes
Will, and Thomas, Tom. We like things
better for the shortness of their names, and
shorten their names for them if we love them
well. If we like mutton as well as beef,
common food as it is, we never could take it in
our mouths as a two-pronged word. Why then
do not the modern godfathers of living
creatures—birds, beasts, fishes, and plants,—
brought to them to be named, give them good
names by which they may be known familiarly
and pleasantly in any home? Why do
they brand them with bad names, and banish
them into the wilderness of jargon?

We have said something about scientific
Billingsgate which we ought to retract, if
Fielding said truly of the ladies of Billingsgate,
that "they speak the very plainest
English of any learned body in the kingdom."
Whatever they may do, they do not give bad
names to their own fish. A lobster with
them is a lobster, not a Homarus vulgaris.
If we did not happen to know lobsters by
their Billingsgate name, would all the curious
facts connected with their history, as told by
men of science, win us to know them by the
name they bear among the learned? Alas
for the Jack, that he should be an Esox
ucius, one of the Abdominal Malacopterygii!

If science must have its Latin nomenclature,
let it give us easy English nomenclature
for everything in nature that was not named
by our forefathers. It is our own good
fortune that when roses and lilies were first
talked about, the common people had the
naming of them. Rapid extension of that
science which now binds with a chain the
two ends of the world together, has made
known a vast number of new objects, has
laid open the way to a vast number of
new thoughts, which are within the
perception of all educated men and women,
and which cannot remain the peculiar
possession of a few. As the general estate of
knowledge widens, old ditches of separation
must be filled; old hedges and walls must be
pulled down. We must weed our estate
also of those ugly words which are the tares
that choke the wheat in many a field full of
rich promise for the people. That such a
field grows more than enough for the miller
and his men who grind its produce, does not
satisfy us. There is a whole people waiting
to be fed.

It is chiefly in the study of life—in that
study which is most fascinating—that men
of science are still cumbering us with clumsiness
in technicalities of speech. The engineer,
whose science men care less to compass, acts
on abstruse calculation, and discusses delicate
machines, without using hard words to vex
the teeth of those about him, and create
unnecessary difficulties. He does not in that way
deter men from seeking for a portion of his
knowledge. He talks simply of cogs, racks,
flywheels, pullies, screws, struts, girders.
There is no such word or thought as
honorificabilitudinitatibus, or Twentysyllableorfeeta.
at all, in his vocabulary.

Our forefathers once universally applied
the system upon which we form such words
as blacksmith, shipwright, or fishmonger.
They called a library a book-house, and the
meeting of a ward, a ward-mote. The
Germans still make language for the people
in this way; and, while the French and English
called the science of the stars from a Greek
word, Astronomy, they and the Dutch spoke
of it as Star-knowledge. We are in this
respect better off than the French, whose
language only can express Yorkshiremen, as
men of the shire of York; but we have allowed
the powers of the English language in word
coining to fall too much into disuse; while the