56 Rhodora [Marcu 
From this it should be clear that Adanson supposed his genus to 
have started with Dioscorides, the identity of whose plant the present 
writer does not attempt to make out, that he thought it might be 
Saccaron of Pliny and Saccharum of Gaspard Bauhin, though of these 
identities he was in doubt; that Phragmites was based actually upon 
Arundo of Scheuchzer’s Agrostographia, 161 (1719) and that the col- 
loquial French names! (of Saccaron and Saccharum, only doubt- 
fully referred by Adanson to his Phragmites) are Sucrier and Cane à 
sucre. That Arundo vulgaris, sive phragmites Dioscoridis of Scheuch- 
zer was the common reed, Arundo phragmites L. Sp. Pl. i. 81 (1753) 
is clear, not only from Scheuchzer's diagnostic “ Folliculis quinis aut 
senis, in calyce? biglumi" and his characteristic figure (t. 3, fig. 14D) 
but since it was made the basis of the name Arundo phragmites by 
Linnaeus. The familiar name Phragmites Adans. (1763) is thus, for- 
tunately, to be retained instead of Trichoon Roth (1798). 
Gray HERBARIUM. 
1 I]t is almost inconceivable that Hitchcock should have stated, that “Adanson 
cites besides [Arundo Scheuz.] four other pre-Lianaean references, two of them 
queried. The other two [Sucrier and Cane à sucre] . . . are to be excluded 
because the few generic characters given, especially that the spikelets have several 
perfect flowers, do not at all apply to them, but do apply to Arundo phragmites. 
Where were the '* other two pre-Linnaean"'' generic names, Sucrier and Cane à sucre, 
published in such a definite way as to justify the assertion of a nomenclatorial spec- 
ialist, that Adanson's “few generic characters given . . . do not at all apply to 
them”? These, of course, were used by Adanson merely as the colloquial French 
names just as, in the same column, he gave the French Fréne for Fraxinus and Fraisier 
for Fragaria. 
?In the original "calylyce" by obvious misprint. 
The date of the February issue (unpublished as this goes to press) will be 
announced later. 
