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were, for their time, noble treatises on systematic and _ historic 
botany. But, keen and penetrating botanical observer that 
Dillen was, he saw generic characters where those venerated 
masters and very high authorities had overlooked them; and 
then, severely just and strongly conservative man which every 
critical or controversial page of his exhibits him, he stands up to 
proclaim the genius and defend the rights of other botanists a 
hundred years dead, and whose works are thrust aside, now in 
his time, as antiquated. 
It is true we should not now call l’Obel or Dodoens profound 
systematic botanists ; but each of these authors gave his account 
of the type before us, under the name J/yosuros, accompanied 
by a very clear wood-cut of the plant; and many other authors 
of succeeding decades followed them. 
The genus should be credited to I’Obel (1576). A century 
later than his time it became the fashion to call the plant a species 
of Ranunculus, and then came the great “Dillenius” to its rescue 
as a generic unit. 
The name is, of course, but the early and apparently univer- 
sal vernacular of “ mouse-tail,” put into Greek; and Linné, in 
selecting a specific name for it, allowed his fancy to dwell upon 
the fact that, for a mouse’s tail, it was a very small one, hence 
our Myosurus minimus. Little did he dream that at some future 
day a half dozen species would be known, and that then maximus 
would seem a better name than minimus for the original one, 
which is the largest of them all. 
A new Variety of Aralia nudicaulis, L. 
For several years I have found a variety of the above so dif- 
erent from the type as to deserve a special description. It differs 
from A. nudicaulzs in being larger, in having many added leaflets, 
and, more than all, in having most of its flowers in compound 
umbels from the first division of the scape. 
Aralia nudicaulis, L., var. PROLIFERA, n. var. Plant smooth 
and nearly stemless; leaf solitary, decompound, palmately about 
twice ternate, the divisions generally pinnate into threes or fives; 
one division often consisting of a single leaflet ; leaflets, twenty-five 
to forty, oblong-obovate, acuminate, finely serrate; scape with 
