Beyond Your Doorstep

by Hal Borland

  To take one example, there was the word “wort,” which still persists in everyday plant names—Webster’s unabridged dictionary lists more than 150 “wort” names for plants in use today. The word “wort” came from the Old English “wyrt,” meaning a plant or a root. The herb folk simply tacked onto it a descriptive term—feverwort, for instance, which we now know as horse gentian and which the botanists list as Triosteum perfoliatum, was a plant from which the herb doctors brewed an infusion to reduce fevers. Sneezewort was supposed to stop sneezing, cankerwort was good to cure cankers, and fleawort probably helped to make life miserable for those hopping insect pests.

  At any rate, the learned men had their long-winded Latin names for plants and animals and the country folk had their descriptive and often colorful names for them, and nobody had yet thought of a really logical system of classifying either plants or animals. The learned compilers of herbals and bestiaries merely expanded their formless lists, and the common folk went right on using the descriptive names in their mother tongue. Common names were of some use in rural herb medicine, and occasionally they showed flashes of folk poetry, but otherwise they were just names.

  In 1552 an Englishman named Wotton tried to organize animal names on the old Aristotelian system, but even his modifications got nowhere in particular. Then late in the seventeenth century another Englishman, John Ray, made a systematic list of animals, chiefly vertebrates, grouping them by structural characteristics and using the term “species” much as we use it today. But Ray didn’t have the genius to do the job.

  Finally, early in the eighteenth century, a young Swede with a Latin name, Carl Linnaeus, came along. Linnaeus was the son of a preacher and avid gardener and grew up with plants. He wanted to be a botanist, so he studied medicine—the doctors of his day used herbs and had to have at least a working knowledge of plants. He became a teacher and the father of modern botany. Taking some of Ray’s ideas and adding his own genius, his passion for order and organization, he published a pamphlet called Systema Naturae in 1735, which for the first time pointed the way toward what is now known as taxonomy, the orderly, scientific classification of plants and animals. Before he died he published many books, two of which are enduring landmarks, Species Plantarium, the foundation of modern botany, and a greatly expanded Systema Naturae, which brought order to the world of animal life for the first time.

  Basic to Linnaeus’s system were two tremendous achievements. First, he grouped and classified both plants and animals according to structural similarities. Second, he inaugurated a simplified system of names, what we now know as the binomial system. Each plant or animal was given a two-word name; the first indicated the genus or family to which the plant or animal belonged, and the second specified the species within that family. Since Latin and Greek were the languages of science in his day, the names he used were of classic extraction, hence understandable to men everywhere who were familiar with the language of scholarship. So Linnaeus not only systematized and simplified botany and zoology, but he gave them a universal language.

  That was the beginning, the first great breakthrough toward scientific understanding of the natural world. Many changes have been made since, particularly in classification, but the basic system that Linnaeus evolved is still used. Scientists have expanded it for their own purposes, sometimes to the bewilderment of the layman and the beginner, but they have never utterly confused it. Order is still there. For instance, fully to describe any particular plant and animal they now use a whole string of terms—first, the kingdom, plant or animal, then the phylum or line of descent, then the class, the order, the family, and finally the genus and species. But for everyday use only the last two terms are ordinarily stated, genus and species. Sometimes a third term is used, to indicate a subspecies, and sometimes a fourth is used to give credit to the person who first described and classified this particular example. But the two terms, genus and species, usually suffice.

  Looking back, Linnaeus’s method of naming things, just to take one phase of his system, seems so simple and so obvious that one wonders why nobody thought of it earlier. For instance, he decided that the dog, the wolf, and the fox belonged to the same genus, which he designated as Canis, the Latin word for dog. So he designated the dog as Canis familiaris, literally “the dog of the family,” or “domestic dog.” The wolf became Canis lupus, from the Latin word for “wolf.” The fox he called Canis vulpes, simply appropriating the Latin word for fox. The old, pre-Linnaean system would have called the fox something like “the small, doglike animal with a long, bushy tail and big, erect ears.” It might even have gone on to describe the color of the coat and the fact that foxes eat grapes as well is birds and rabbits. Linnaeus compressed the essential information into the two words which said it was the species of dog known as a fox.

  Not all scientific names are that simple and direct, I grant you, but they all have a logical meaning. And some of them are as graphic as the common names; some even more so. The American skunk, for example, gets its common name from the Algonquian Indian word for the beast, “seganku.” But its scientific name is Mephitis, Latin for “noxious vapor,” as appropriate a name as could be imagined.

  In the field of botany a good many of the common names have been appropriated in the scientific names. Some are quite obvious, as the anemone or windflower. Anemone is simply the Greek word for “wind,” and we use it in anemometer, an instrument for measuring the wind. Botanically the windflower or anemone is still Anemone-Anemone quinquefolia in the case of the wood anemone because its leaves have five divisions, Anemone trifolia for the mountain anemone which has three-part leaves. The genus name is from the Greek and the species name is Latin, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Scholars object loudly when coiners of words tack a Greek ending onto a word with a Latin root, but I have never heard such criticism of the mixed origins of many scientific names. I am not one to venture a judgment, having forgotten most of the Latin I once had and never having had any Greek, I am sorry to say.

  In any case, the scientific names have their own fascination and the person with a curious turn of thought can play all kinds of games with them. They are the precise language of botany and zoology, and they have order and reason and system in them. Most of them are descriptive, though I must admit that some of the descriptions baffle me. For instance, the common clothes moth is Tineola biselliella, literally the “double-seated little moth.” The bluebottle fly is Calliphora erythrocephala, literally a “red-headed beauty bearer.” The house martin is Delichon urbica, the “city swallow”; but that Delichon is an anagram for Chelidon, which is Greek for “swallow.” Somebody was playing word games, and I wonder who and why.

  But to come back to the common names, before we go on to the list.

  I mentioned that the common names, particularly of plants, sometimes had flashes of poetry as well as homely descriptive turns of language. It is the poetry of country folk, the imagery of people who live close to the earth, and sometimes it is quite graphic. Take “buttercup” and forget that it is a flower. Pure descriptive poetry. Or “Dutchman’s-breeches,” poetry with a grin. Or “bittersweet” or “checkerberry” or “moneywort,” the common myrtle of the beautiful golden-yellow flowers. I wonder if he who gave it that name was calling it, in his own way, a money-plant because of its golden blossoms or if the plant had some commercial value at one time. There is also a pennywort.

  Take bee balm, the scarlet bergamot beloved by bumblebees and hummingbirds. Take mad-dog skullcap, a mixed figure if there ever was one, but certainly picturesque. Or St. John’s-wort, named for its petals, which supposedly imitate the cross of St. John. Or one of the same family, St. Andrew’s cross, whose four yellow petals form a cross like that of St. Andrew.

  Take tear-thumb, that thorny-stemmed member of the buckwheat family which must have wounded many a careless thumb. Or take buckwheat itself. The “buck” comes from the German “boek” for the beech tree. The seed of the buckwheat looks somewhat like a minia
ture beechnut. Hence, buckwheat, the wheat or grain that looks like a beechnut. Take meadowsweet, that fragrant wildflower with tufts of pink blossoms full of the sweet fragrance characteristic of most members of the rose family, to which it belongs.

  Take liverwort, presumably once used by the herb doctors to treat a liver complaint. Another common name is Hepatica, and Hepatica is its botanical name. And Hepatica? It comes from the Greek hepaticos, the liver, made familiar in recent years by the disease hepatitis. Liverwort, hepatica, and back to liver, through the Greek.

  Every time I leaf through a botany text or a wildflower handbook I am fascinated by the names. There is history and poetry and geography and even biography in them.

  One more example.

  Out in the edge of my pasture is a small patch of horse balm or rich weed, botanically Collinsonia canadensis. Curious, I began to search for the origin of that botanical name, and I came at last to Peter Collinson, who was an amateur botanist and naturalist in England in the early eighteenth century. He was one of that group of inquiring minds, both in England and in America, which poked into all kinds of natural phenomena and, by the very act of inquiry, helped lay the groundwork for natural science.

  Collinson had a number of American correspondents and exchanged both plants and ideas with them. He introduced a number of American plants into England, and he had a part in introducing the culture of hemp, flax, and silkworms into America. He was a correspondent of Benjamin Franklin. Their exchange of letters, however, was about other natural phenomena than botany, since Franklin was not much of a botanist. Peter Collinson sent Franklin his first information about electrical experiments being made in Europe, and thus had an indirect hand in Franklin’s kite-and-key experiment and other electrical inquiries which, one way and another, eventually led to the lines which now bring electricity to my farm to run my furnace, my refrigerator, even the typewriter on which these words are being written. Peter Collinson, whose name is an obscure entry in the reference books, but who is there in the botany books for all time—Collinsonia, rich weed, horse balm, one of the lesser members of the mint family and which grows in my back pasture.

  One final word about these lists. Although they include virtually all the species I have mentioned in this book, they are mere samplings in each category. A list of all the known plants, birds, animals, and insects would literally fill several volumes. As an example, there are about 3,500 identified species of mammals in the world, 389 in North America. There are some 8,600 species of birds, 686 in the United States. There are about 250,000 identified plant species. And when it comes to insects, the number of species is astonishing and an approximation at best; there are 22,000 listed species of beetles alone in the United States! Or were when I last looked; the number seems to rise every few months.

  Among the taxonomists—the namers and listers—there are two schools, sometimes called “The Lumpers” and “The Splitters.” The Lumpers would limit and simplify the listings of species and subspecies, and the Splitters would expand and complicate them. No doubt both factions have sound reasons for their stand, but it does seem to me that the Splitters have strained at quite a few gnats in their passion for diversifying the species. And my layman’s complaint is joined by a good many scientists, especially in the fields of ornithology and entomology.

  In any case, my combined list of Animals, Fish and Amphibians, Insects, Plants, and Reptiles comes to only about 500. That is what I mean by a sampling.

  Animals

  COMMON NAME

  SCIENTIFIC NAME

  Bat, Little Brown

  Myotis lucifugus

  Bear

  Black, or brown

  Grizzly

  Euarctos americanus

  Ursus horribilis

  Bobcat—see Lynx

  Cat, domestic

  Felis catus

  Chipmunk, Eastern

  Tamias striatus

  Deer

  Mule

  White-tail; Virginia

  Odocoileus hemionus

  Odocoileus virginiamus

  Elk; Wapiti

  Cervus candensis

  Fox

  Gray

  Red

  Urocyon cinereoargentus

  Vulpes fulva

  Lemming, Northern Bog

  Synaptomys borealis

  Lynx

  Lynx canadensis

  Mole, Eastern

  Scalopus aquaticus

  Moose

  Alces americana

  Mouse

  Deer

  House

  White-footed

  Permomyscus maniculatus

  Mus musculus

  Permomyscus leocopus

  Muskrat

  Ondatra zibethicus

  Opposum

  Didelphia marsupialis

  Otter, river

  Lutra canadensis

  Panther; Cougar; Mountain Lion

  Felis concolor

  Porcupine

  Erethizon dorsatum

  Prairie Dog

  Cyonomys ludvicianus

  Pronghorn (Antelope)

  Antilocapra americana

  Rabbit

  Cottontail, Eastern

  Cottontail, New England

  Snowshoe (a hare, really)

  Sylvilagus floridanus

  Sylvilagus transitionalis

  Lepus americanus

  Raccoon

  Procyon lotor

  Rat

  Black

  Domestic; Norwegian

  Rattus rattus

  Rattus norvegicus

  Shrew

  Common; Masked

  Short-tailed

  Water

  Sorex cinereus

  Blarina brevicauda

  Sorex palustris

  Skunk

  Mephitis mephitis

  Squirrel

  Flying

  Fox

  Gray

  Red

  Glaucumys sabrinus

  Sciurus niger

  Sciurus carolinensus

  Tamiasciurus hudsonicus

  Vole

  Meadow

  Pine

  Microtus pennsylvanicus

  Microtus pinetorum

  Wolf

  Canis lupus

  Woodchuck; Ground Hog

  Mormota monax

  Birds

  COMMON NAME

  SCIENTIFIC NAME

  Bittern, American

  Botaurus lentiginosus

  Blackbird

  Brown-headed Cowbird

  Red-wing

  Rusty

  Yellow-headed

  Molothrus ater

  Agelaius phoeniceus

  Eophagus carolinus

  Xanthocephalus

  Bluebird

  Sialia sialis

  Blue Jay

  Cyanocitta cristata

  Bobolink

  Dolichonyx oryzivorus

  Bob-white; Quail

  Colinus virginianus

  Brown Thrasher

  Toxostoma rufum

  Bunting, Indigo

  Passerina cyanea

  Buzzard; Turkey Vulture

  Cathartes aura

  Cardinal

  Richmondena cardinalis

  Catbird

  Dumetella carolinensis

  Chat, Yellow-breasted

  Icteria virens

  Chickadee, Black-capped

  Panes atricapillus

  Coot, American

  Fulica americana

  Cowbird—see Blackbird

  Crow

  Corvus brachyrhynchos

  Dove, Mourning

  Zenaidura macroura

  Duck

  Black

  Mallard

  Wood

  Anas rubripes

  Anas platyrhynchos

  Aix sponsa

  Flicker—see Woodpecker

  Flycatcher, Trail
l’s or Alder

  Empidonax traillii

  Goldfinch

  Spinus tristus

  Goose

  Canada

  Snow

  Branta canadensis

  Chen hyperborea

  Grackle

  Boat-tailed

  Common

  Cassidix mexicanus

  Quiscalus quiscula

  Grosbeak

  Evening

  Rose-breasted

  Hesperiphona vespertina Pheucticus ludovicianus

  Hawk

  Red-shouldered

  Red-tailed

  Sparrow

  Buteo lineatus

  Buteo jamaicensis

  Falco sparverius

  Heron

  Great Blue

  Little Green

  Ardea herodias

  Butorides virescens

  Hummingbird, Ruby-throat

  Archilochus colubris

  Junco; Snowbird

  Junco hyemalis

  Kingbird

  Tyrannus tyrannus

  Kingfisher

  Megaceryle alcyon

  Kinglet, Golden-crowned

  Regulus satrapa

  Martin, Purple

  Progne subis

  Meadowlark

  Sturnella magna

  Merganser

  American

  Hooded

  Mergus merganser Lophodytes cucullatus

  Nighthawk

  Chordeiles minor