"Few of our wild flowers give intenser pleasure than the cowslip, yet perhaps there is scarcely any whose peculiar beauty depends so much upon locality and surroundings. There is a homely simplicity about the cowslip, much like that of the daisy, though more pensive,--the quiet, sober look of an unpretending country girl, not strikingly beautiful in feature or attire, but clean and fresh as if new bathed in milk and carrying us away to thoughts of daisies, flocks and pasturage and the manners of a simple, primitive time, some golden age of shepherd-life long since gone by. And more; in looking at the cowslip we are always most forcibly struck by its apparent wholesomeness and health. This wholesomeness is quite unmistakable. It belongs even to the smell so widely different from the often oppressive perfume of other plants, as lilies, narcissuses, or violets. Now just such a healthy milk-fed look, just such a sweet, healthy odor is what we find in cows--an odor which breathes around them as they sit at rest in the pasture. The 'lips,' of course, is but a general resemblance to the shape of the petals and suggests the source of the fragrance. The cowslip, as we have said, is a singularly healthy-looking plant, indeed, nothing about it is more remarkable. It has none of the delicacy and timidity of the primrose. All its characters are well and healthily pronounced. The paleness is uniform, steady, and rather impresses us as whiteness; and the yellow of the cup is as rich as gold. The odor is not faint, but saccharine and luscious. It does not shrink into the sheltered covert, but courts the free air and sunshine of the open fields; and instead of its flowers peeping timidly from behind surrounding leaves, it raises them boldly on a stout, sufficient stalk, the most conspicuous object in the meadow. Its poetry is the poetry of common life, but of the most delicious common life that can exist. The plant is in some respects careless to the verge of disorder; and you should note that carelessness well, till you feel the force of it, as especially in the lame imperfection of the flower buds, only, perhaps half of them well developed and the rest dangling all of unequal lengths. Essentially the cowslip and the primrose are only the same plant in two different forms, the one being convertible into the other. The primrose is the cowslip of the woods and sheltered lanes; the cowslip is the primrose of the fields." The name cowslip is not derived from the lips of the cow, but, according to Skeat, the great Anglo-Saxon authority, it comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning dung and was given to the plant because it springs up in meadows where cows are pastured.