for instance—tend to pass as all one and the same. That is unlikely to matter
unless beneath the outward similarity there are substantial differences in
chemical potency, as could well be the case with willows (Salix) or mints of
the genus Mentha,for example; information on that score, however, is at pre-
sent mainly lacking. More seriously, in the lowlier and more obscure sections
of the plant world, separation of species is by and large not attempted and
nothing more enlightening than ‘grass’ or ‘moss’ too often features in the folk
medicine records. But this last may be just as much the fault of the collectors
of folk remedies themselves, unskilled as so many of them are in field botany.
That also helps to explain why there is so much tedious repetition in the
records of remedies so common that they must surely be well known already
(such as the use of dock leaves for stings). It is far easier to note down those
than probe for ones involving plants unfamiliar to the collector.
It is vernacular names, though, that cause most problems. These can bear
little or no relation to the ones used in books for the plants in question, and
they may be peculiar just to a single area or even a single household. The
same name can be shared by several plants that are unrelated. Conversely,
one species may have accumulated a large number of country names down
the centuries; for the red campion (Silene dioica) more than sixty English-lan-
guage ones have been recorded from Britain and Ireland, and the Celtic lan-
guages could produce still more.
A problem special to a primarily oral study is the mishearing of names,
especially if they are ones unfamiliar to the enquirer. This may account for the
existence of some that have defeated all attempts to identify the plant referred
to—they are perhaps just ghosts, without any substance in the first place.
Mishearings are all the more likely to occur when enquirers are unfamiliar
not only with the name but with the local accent or even the language in
which it is told to them. Many of the names borne by plants in Ireland or the
Scottish Highlands are Gaelic ones that have been garbled in the process of
being written down, like so many of the place-names there. Gaelic speakers,
equipped to recognise sounds that may have occasioned misunderstandings
in transmission, have fortunately proved able to supply identifications in the
case of many records which would otherwise have had to be omitted from
this work.
Inherent in this field of study there is also an altogether more fundamen-
tal difficulty. The more developed a country becomes, the ever less obvious
the distinction that remains between its folk medicine in the sense of the
aboriginal, underlying layer of folk medicine practices and beliefs and the
Herbs Without the Herbals 27