IF we can accept as tolerably complete the view of early Achæan beliefs presented to us in the Iliad and Odyssey, they included but few legendary associations with vegetable growths. The treatment of the Homeric flora, like that of the Homeric fauna, is essentially simple and direct. One magic herb has a place in it, and the ‘enchanted stem’ of the lotus bears fruit of inexplicable potency over the subtly compounded human organism; but tree-worship is as remote from the poet’s thoughts as animal-worship, and flower-myths seem equally beyond his ken. He knew of no ‘love-lies-bleeding’ stories interpreting the passionate glow of scarlet petals; nor of ‘forget-me-not’ stories fitted to the more tender sentiment of azure blooms; nor of delicate calyxes nurtured by goddesses’ tears; nor of any other of the wistful human fancies endlessly intertwined with the beautiful starry apparitions of spring-tide on the blossoming earth. The simplicity of his admiration for them might, indeed, almost have incurred the disapprobation of ultra-Wordsworthians. With the ‘yellow primrose’ he never had an opportunity of making acquaintance, by ‘the river’s brim’ or elsewhere; but crocuses or hyacinths, violets or poppies, drew him into no reveries; no mystical meanings clung about the images of them in his mind; he looked at them with open eyes of delight, and went his way. The oak has been called the king of the forest, as the lion the king of beasts. But its supremacy is largely a thing of the past. To the early undivided Aryans, it was the tree of trees. Their common name for it, which survived with its original special meaning in Celtic and Greek, came, in other languages, to denote the generalised conception of a tree, showing the oak to have been pre-eminent in their common ancestral home. Traces of this shifting of the linguistic standpoint are preserved in some Homeric phrases. Thus, _drûs_—etymologically identical with the English _tree_—means, not only an oak, but, most probably, the particular kind of oak familiar to us in England—_Quercus robur_, ‘the unwedgeable and gnarled oak’ of Shakespeare. But the generic significance gradually infused into the specific term comes to the front in several of its compounds. A wood-cutter, for instance, is, in the Iliad, literally an ‘oak-cutter,’ and the ‘solemn shade’ round Circe’s dwelling was afforded, etymologically, by an oaken grove, although the meaning really conveyed by the word _drûma_ was that of a collection of forest-trees of undetermined and various kinds. In later Greek, too, we find a woodpecker styled an ‘oakpecker’; and the Dryades, while in name ‘oak-nymphs,’ were, in point of fact, unrestricted in their choice of an arboreal dwelling-place. By a curious survival of associations, the name in modern Greek of this antique forest-constituent is _dendron_, a tree; yet it is now by no means common in Greece. Homer’s oaks were mountain-reared, sturdy, proof against most contingencies of climate. Of