32 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



It ought here to be noted that for the combining of Melilotus with 

 Trifolium, Dodonaeus is reponsible but not Bauhin, who at this 

 point saw fit to abandon the trifoliolate leaves as essentially and 

 without exception conclusive of membership in Trifolium. He 

 does not, however, as others had done before him, accept the 

 melilot species as constituting a genus of their own, but places them 

 all as members of the genus Lotus, where also some species are 

 trifoliolate, others not so. 



I observe also that if only the first four of the species of the above 

 list had gained admission to Trifolium along with the clovers proper, 

 one might have thought it probable that some dependence, after all, 

 had been placed upon the floral structure; for in that case th e 

 authors would have had a Trifolium composed of papilionaceous 

 plants exclusively. But neither in the defining of the genus 

 nor in the description of a single one of the about sixty species of 

 Bauhin's Trifolium is any mention made of the morphology of the 

 flower. And by the admission of gentian aceous, oxalidaceous, and 

 ranunculaceous types into that genus it is placed beyond question 

 that in his mind the genus was limited by nothing else but the 

 herbaceous nature of the plants, ternate foliage, and dry fruits. I 

 say dry fruits, because in Bauhin's book the strawberries, as typic- 

 ally trifoliolate as the most genuine of clovers and as herbaceous, 

 stand in closest juxtaposition to them, and it is manifest that their, 

 juicy berry-like receptacles, with seeds all on the outside, saved 

 Fragaria from being merged in the Trifolium of that author. 

 And in this giving so much attention to the fruit where flowers were 

 wholly ignored we see the influence of Cesalpino's great treatise; 

 for Bauhin and Cesalpino were contemporaries, in a manner, 

 the former younger by thirty years. 



All through such books as have here been cited one reads the 

 resoluteness of purpose and the hard perseverance with which men 

 labored to improve botanical system by studying and comparing 

 texture and duration of stems, and above all else the morphology 

 of leaves; a very crude system at its best; but system of some sort 

 there had to be; the flower was still virtually unknown; the fruit 

 was barely beginning to be appreciated in its usefulness to taxonomy ; 

 therefore the vegetative organs, chiefly the leaves, were most 

 commonly allowed to be decisive. 



The appeal to leaves was not, however, first thought of in either 

 the seventeenth century or the sixteenth. Even then it had been 

 more or less in vogue for three or four thousand years that we 

 know of. 



