And because plants come from all over the world and are studied and loved by people of many different languages, it became necessary very early in the descriptive writings about them to hit upon some device that should insure the name of a particular plant being the same all over the world, whether used by a student in the Imperial University of China, or by a garden enthusiast in Connecticut. At the time when this need for christening plants with names that would pass current throughout the world was getting to be a crying necessity, the language of all learned men was Latin, so it was natural that they should give Latin names to plants. That practice has continued to the present day, and there are even now some botanists that cling to the old custom of describing the newly christened plant in Latin. In the olden days this was always done, so that much of our knowledge of plants has come down to us from early books written wholly in Latin. The unfamiliarity of Latin to most of us, and the terrifyingly difficult spelling of some plant names, has resulted in many people saying: “God made the flowers, but the devil gave them names.” Nevertheless, these Latin names are the only ones we can use without endless confusion, just as we bear the names assigned to us by our parents, and no others. If we were to go out into the country and pick up a wild rose which seemed to be different from any other rose, it would be necessary, in order to talk about it subsequently, to give it a name. After carefully searching through all the books about roses and finding out that it really is a new kind of rose rather than merely being new to us, we should then be ready to christen our new find. As we have said, all plants bear two names. One of these is a general one, like Smith, for instance, and the other more specific, like John. These general names of plants, and they are always their first names, are, because they fix the plant as belonging to a particular group, known as generic names. The generic name of violets, for instance, is _Viola_; of buttercups, _Ranunculus_; of wheat, _Triticum_; of corn, _Zea_; and of roses, _Rosa_. Our new rose then bears, without any act of ours, the generic name _Rosa_, which was applied to roses many years ago, and must therefore be used for all subsequently discovered roses. This generic name of _Rosa_, like all other generic names, tells us that roses are a well-recognized group of plants, all more like one another than like blackberries, for instance, and because of this they are said to all belong to the same genus. A genus (plural, genera) is a group of different plants, all more like one another than like anything else. To go back to our new _Rosa_, we must now apply its second and more specific name. If it were a white rose, and had never before been described, we should almost certainly use for its second name something signifying its color and assign _alba_ as the obvious Latin equivalent of white.