Whatever the name may mean—­it is bad Latin.  There is such a word as Lenticularis—­there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us no longer.[14]

The Butterworts are a perfectly distinct group—­whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance.  Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculae,)—­their English, Bog-Violet, or, more familiarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, Grassette.

The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,

1.  Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group.  As bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the noblest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I believe) with us.  Their colour is, however, more broken and less characteristic than that of the following species.

2.  Pinguicula Violacea:  Violet-coloured Butterwort, (instead of ‘vulgaris,’) the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.

3.  Pinguicula Alpina:  Alpine Butterwort, white and much smaller than either of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453.  Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern Europe.  “In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire, where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it.”  (Grindon.)

4.  Pinguicula Pallida:  Pale Butterwort.  From Sowerby’s drawing, (135, vol. iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group.  The leaves, “like those of other species, but rather more delicate and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin.  Tube of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy); the petals, pale violet.  It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew.  But the Villosa has a slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end.”  (Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called ‘Lusitanica,’ but I find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation.  Sowerby’s plant came from Blandford, Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran, and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape Wrath.  My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found.

[Illustration:  FIG.  III.]

5.  Pinguicula Minima:  Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the scape of it being hairy.  I have not yet got rid of this absurd word ‘scape,’ meaning, in botanist’s Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing out of a cluster of leaves on the ground.  It is a bad corruption of ‘sceptre,’ and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is necessarily branched.[15] In ‘Proserpina,’ when it