Folio 77v - Of fish, continued. De arboribus; Of trees.
Of these, some are called water frogs, others marsh; some are called toads, rubete, because they live in brambles, rubus; they are larger than the others. Others are called calamites, since they live among reeds, calamus, and bushes; they are the smallest of all, they are green, they are dumb, and they have no croak. Egredula are very small frogs living on dry ground or in fields, ager, from which they get their name. Some say that dogs will not bark if you give them a live frog to eat.
According to Pliny, the names of the creatures living in water total one hundred and forty-four, divided, into the following species: monsters, amphibious serpents, crabs, shellfish, lobsters, mussels, polyps, flatfish, lizards, rockfish and those like it.
Of trees
The word for trees, arbores, and grasses, herbe, is believed to come from arva, a field, because they adhere to the earth with their roots which lie fast within it. The two words are almost the same, because one springs from the other. For when you throw a seed into the earth, first a grass shoot rises. Thereafter, with nourishment, it grows into a tree and within a short time, from looking down at shoot of grass you are looking up at a sapling.
The word arbusta is, as it were, arboris hasta, 'the shaft of the tree'; the word arbustum is taken by others take it to mean 'plantation', a place where there are trees; as salictum and salicta, and turecta mean places where there are willows and small trees, young and turning green.
A shrub, frutex, is small and is so called because puts forth leaves and covers, tegere, the ground; the plural form is frutecta.
A wood, nemus, gets its name from numina, deities, because the heathen consecrated their idols there; for woods contain large trees, whose boughs give deep shade.
A tall thicket of trees, lucus, is so called because it springs to a great height, rising to the sky. Grafting, insitio, is said to take place when a shoot from a fertile tree is implanted, inserere, into a cut made in the trunk of a barren tree.
Cuttings, plante, are taken from trees. But sets, plantaria, are those which are grown from seed