LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 2p/ 



principle so manifestly valid, and so surely destined to revolutionize 

 completely all botanical system, can not but have fired with 

 enthusiasm a man only some twenty years old a year or two more, 

 possibly, and quite as possibly a year or two less but in his writing 

 how completely does he repress all enthusiasm. Profoundly 

 respectful toward venerated authorities of two thousand years 

 before who had held that agreement as to properties was required 

 in order to establish the fact of interrelationship, he investigates 

 licorice root to find that also by qualitative criteria as well as by 

 floral structure the plant proves itself a member of the legumin- 

 osae. In this repression of excessive enthusiasm for the new, and 

 continuing to respect the old principles, some later celebrities are 

 in unfavorable contrast to Cordus; for they so greatly magnified 

 the value of the new anthology, as to write intolerantly and even in 

 derision of the old ideas that vegetative characters and sensible 

 qualities have taxonomic weight. 1 



We must follow Cordus a few steps further in this path of the 

 discovery of relationships; for he is making distinct and lasting 

 landmarks in the history of plant families. 



Tracing backwards the history of the Cucurbitace<z, we reach no 

 point, however ancient, at which gourds, pumpkins, squashes, 

 melons, and cucumbers were not recognized collectively in their 

 status of a family, or larger genus, as such a group was at first 

 named. In their mode of growth, their coarse, rough herbage, and 

 even as to the structure and qualities of their familiar large firm- 

 fleshy fruits, they were in a comprehensive way at one. Any 

 cultivator of them, however untaught, would be botanist enough 

 to see that. Meanwhile there were two or three other types, long 

 and familiarly known, which had never been thought of by even the 

 most skillful botanists, as cognates of gourds and cucumbers. They 

 were the bryonias and the momordicas. According to such signs 

 of consanguinity as availed with the ancients, these could never 

 have been thought of as possible cucurbits. They were not large, 

 coarse, harshly almost hispid plants, but were small, compara- 

 tively smooth and delicate in texture; and the bryonias, so far 

 from yielding any fruit the least like gourds and melons, put forth 

 bunches of small, soft, pulpy berries, red or black, more like those 

 of nightshades. In the second place there were no mild qualities 

 in these plants, no parts were edible. They were actively medi- 

 cinal, and some of them powerfully narcotic-scented. It was no less 



i See Tournefort's Elemens (1694). also Linnaeus' Philosophic Botanica 



