air of bronze
cymbals which once did duty for the sacred rites of Egyptian deities."
They are figured in English MSS. of the thirteenth century, and Mr Galpin
gives a figure of a cymbal-player (as shown in a fourteenth century MS.)
vigorously clashing his instrument. There was also an apparatus known as
a jingling johnny, figured by Galpin at p. 258. It was a pole bearing a
number of bells, hence the name which it doubtless deserved. The
crescents with which it is decorated are an inheritance from its forbears
of the Janizary bands.

Mr Galpin ends his book with a very interesting chapter on the _Consort_,
_i.e._ Concert, which, however, does not lend itself to that abbreviation
to which the rest of the book has been mercilessly subjected.

THE TRADITIONAL NAMES OF ENGLISH PLANTS

I do not pretend to be a specialist in the study of plant-names. But
there is something to be said for ignorance (in moderation), since it
brings reader and writer more closely together than is the case when the
author knows the last word in a subject of which the reader knows
nothing. But we need not consider the case of the blankly ignorant
reader, and I can undertake that (for very sufficient reasons) I shall
not be offensively learned.

The fact that language is handed on from one generation to the next may
remind us of heredity, and the way in which words change is a case of
variation. But we cannot understand what determines the extinction of
old words or the birth of new ones. We cannot, in fact, understand how
the principle of natural selection is applicable to language: yet there
must be a survival of the fittest in words, as in living creatures.
Language is a quality of man, and just as we can point to big racial
groups such as that which includes the English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian, Icelandic and German peoples, so their languages, though
differing greatly in detail, have certain well-marked resemblances. Of
course I do not mean to imply that language is hereditary, like the form
of skull or the colour of the hair. I only insist on these familiar
facts in order to show that the wonderful romance inherent in the great
subject of evolution also illumines that cycle of birth and death to
which existing plant-names are due.

In the case of living creatures we can at least make a guess as to what
are the qualities that have made them succeed in the struggle for life.
But in the case of the birth and death