The names of many flowers have been taken from the names of persons, and this still goes on to-day when new varieties of roses or sweet peas are called after the person who first grew them, or some friend of this person. These modern names are not, as a rule, very romantic, but some of the older ones are interesting. The _dahlia_, for instance, was called after Dahl, a Swedish botanist, who was a pupil of the great botanist Linnaeus, after whom the chief botanical society in England, the _Linnaean Society_, is called. The _lobelia_ was so called after Matthias de Lobel, a Flemish botanist and physician to King James I. The _fuchsia_ took its name from Leonard Fuchs, a sixteenth-century botanist, the first German who really studied botany. There are many more new things and names to-day than in earlier times, names which our grand-parents and even our parents did not know when they were children. We talk familiarly now about _aeroplanes_ and the different kinds of aeroplanes, such as the _monoplane_, _biplane_, etc. But these are new names invented in the last twenty years. Some of the names of airships and aeroplanes are very interesting. The _Taube_, for instance, is so called from the German word meaning "dove," because it looks very like a bird when it is up in the sky. The great German airships called _Zeppelins_ took their name from the German Count Zeppelin, who invented them; and the splendid French airships called _Fokkers_ also take their name from their inventor, and so does the _Gotha_--name of ill-fame. The man who first discovered gunpowder is forgotten, but many of the powerful guns which are used in modern warfare are called after their inventors. The _Gatling gun_ is not much talked of to-day, but it was a famous gun in its time, and took its name from the American inventor, Richard Jordan Gatling, who lived in the early nineteenth century, and devoted his life to inventions. Some were peaceable inventions, like machines for sowing cotton and rice; but he is best remembered by the great gun to which he gave his name. Another famous gun of which we have heard a great deal in the Great War is the _Maxim gun_, which again took its name from its inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim. The _shrapnel_, of which also so much was heard in the Great War, the terrible shells which burst a certain time after leaving the gun without striking against anything, took its name from its inventor. The chief peculiarity of shrapnel is that the bullets fall from above in a shower from the shell as it bursts in the air.