BULLETIN 
TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB. 
Vol. XIV.J New York, September, 1887. {No. 9. 
Bibliographical Notes on well known Plants,—IIL. 
By EDWARD L. GREENE. 
NYMPHAA and NUPHAR. 
By a very great majority of botanists, taking the past along 
with the present, these two genera have been confounded. Pond- 
lilies, white-flowered and yellow-flowered, have been known from 
the remotest antiquity, and both were called Nymphea by the 
Greeks and Latins of old. In all the ponderous folios and quar- 
tos of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century botany, 
as well as in several of the very front rank of authors in the ear+ 
liest decade of our own century, we find Mymphea still un- 
divided, and embracing all the known species of water lilies, 
whether white or yellow-flowered. Until about eighty years 
ago, Nymphaea alba, a binary name still in use: for a certain 
European plant, included several of our nympheas, and Vym- 
phea lutea covered an equal number of our nuphars. The fact 
that Brunfels, as long ago as the year 1534, proposed for these 
plants the Arabic name Wenufar, in place of the Greek Vym- 
phea, is worth mentioning only because it is about the first ap- 
pearance of the name at present accepted for the yellow pond- 
lilies. He had not a thought of distinguishing here two genera. 
It is not strange that Linné did not separate them; because 
‘the faculty for generical discrimination was not among the 
elements which combined to make his greatness. In this regard, 
there were not many. among his contemporaries or immediate 
forerunners who did not excel him. Some -of thé Linnzan 
genera are pretty nearly co-extensive with natural orders as now 
everywhere received. Yet A. L. de Jussieu (1789), and even 
Joseph Gzertner (1791), that masterly botanist who, in analytical 
-power, surpassed all his predecessors, and whose great work, De 
Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum, marked the beginning of a 
new era in the history of genera, still left the old genus Nym-. 
phea undivided. It might well at the present day raise a doubt, 
