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INTRODUCTION TO BOTANY. 231
them. In like manner medical students may proceed with
respect to the plants of the materia medica.
Succulent fruits and seeds can only be preserved in spirit
of wine, or saturated brine, changing it when it becomes
too highly coloured : the dry fruits and seeds require no
other care than to prevent tlie ravages of insects.
Mushrooms may be dried by being buried in very dry
sand, and placed in a warm situation: but some of these
are so watery, that they cannot be preserved even in this
or any other known method.
To prevent the destruction of this collection by the in-
sects, which soon begin to attack some tribes of plants,
especially the acrid" and pungent families of the cruel ferae
and euphorbiacese, as also the compositse and umbelliferse,
the best method seems to be the washing over of the specimens
with a hair pencil charged with a solution of corrosive
sublimate in spirit of wine, after which no insect
can touch them: but as foreigners always examine plants;
by their taste, as well as their other characters, it will be
necessary to notice this impregnation, either at the commencement
of the series, or by annexing some markvtb
each plant thus treated.
5. On the Names of Plants.
The old botanists, studying things rather than words,
and more engaged in finding the uses of the plants ihat
grew the most abundantly around them, or were imported
by the merchants, than in forming catalogues to comprehend
all that nature or the province produced, contented
themselves with the names given to the best known plants
by the peasantry of the country, and which, when we can
discover their true etymology, are usually strikingly significative
of them, or refer to their use in medicine, economy,
or the arts; and as to the less known ones, they referred
them from their appearance to some of the better known
plants; and if they had occasion to mention them, they
added to the name of the better known plants such short
phrases as they judged necessary to explain the difference.
By this means each of the well known plants, the rose, rue,
pea, &c. and sometimes the cultivated varieties of them, as
chasselas, muscats, became, to use our modern language,
the type of a genus, the species of which were distinguished
by descriptive phrases, of greater or less length, as the differences
were more or less distinctly marked, as the white