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My delight, therefore, was great when I was ... able to identify the charming little eyebright, the strange-looking cow-wheat and louse-wort, the handsome mullein and the pretty creeping toad-flax, and to find that all of them, as well as the lordly foxglove, formed parts of one great natural order, and that under all their superficial diversity of form was a similarity of structure which, when once clearly understood, enabled me to locate each fresh species with greater ease."
Cockayne would derive cowslip from cu, cow, and slyppe, lip, and cow-wheat is so nicknamed from its seed resembling wheat, but being worthless as food for man. The flowers of the Arum maculatum are "bulls and cows;" and in Yorkshire the fruit of Crataegus oxyacantha is bull-horns; an old name for the horse-leek being bullock's-eye.
Why, even the little cow-wheat, a very old- world plant, which only grows in ancient woods, has found its way back again, I know not whence, and covers the open spaces with its pretty yellow and white flowers. Man had conquered this mount, you see, from Madam How, hundreds of years ago.
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