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XVI. A Monog graph of the Genus Paonia. By the late George 
Anderson, Esq. F. L.S. 4c. 
Read February 4 and 18, 1817. 
Tus male and female Pæonies of Theophrastus, Pliny and Di- 
oscorides are ascertained to be the plants that were known by 
those names after the revival of letters. Clusius, of the sixteenth 
century, seems to have been the first who made any addition to 
these. That truly original writer describes the plants he saw du- 
ring his travels with a clearness which, considering the infant 
state of science at the time, deserves more praise than seems to 
have been bestowed on him. A number of botanical authors 
towards the close of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth 
century, chiefly copying him and each other, increased the cata- 
logue; but their descriptions are in general so ill defined, and so 
replete with inaccuracies, that much information cannot be ob- 
tained from them. John Bauhin and ourcountryman Morison 
are the principal writers, after Clusius, who can be depended 
upon, till the days of Linné ; gnd his opinions upon Pæonies were 
singular and erroneous. 
In the Hortus Ch liffortianus, his earliest publication, in 1737, he 
discloses doubts on the subject by observing underneath P. offici- 
nalis—* Qui considerat notas essentiales str ucturamque plante, non 
potest non palpitare vastum istum apud authores numerum, non nisi 
meris varietatibus constare." He afterwards makes up his mind ; 
and i in the first edition of Species Plantarum reduces all the Pæo- 
nies 
