LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 39 



stated this case hypothetically ; but there are provinces where the 

 situation is to-day actual. 



But the greater number of my hypothetic forty-nine, as I have 

 said, will even fail to discover that a plant group has been named 

 and defined on any page where the modern typographical conven- 

 tionalities are not in evidence. I think that among such as are 

 quite proficient in systematic botany there are many whose im- 

 pression of the printed pages of Ruellius, of Dorsten, and of several 

 other classics of sixteenth-century botany would be that they give 

 no account of families, genera, or species; and this only because 

 great authors had not then learned to make a separate paragraph 

 for every group, and to print the names of genera and of species in 

 type different from and more conspicuous than that used for the 

 descriptive passages. There is no question of the superior con- 

 venience of our modern style of printing taxonomic matter; still, 

 for the mistaking of mere incidentals for essentials by people 

 professedly scientific, it is not easy to frame excuse. But the psy- 

 chologic fact is well established that men do in this wise err, and 

 that there are multitudes of biologic taxonomists whom familiar 

 usage has completely deceived into thinking that no name is generic 

 unless printed in large letters; multitudes of botanists who will 

 have been startled by the proposition incontestable that clover, 

 parsley, hazel, and birch, all as here printed, are names as perfectly 

 generic as TRIFOLIUM, APIUM, CORYLUS, and BETULA. 

 Moreover, there have been learned historians of botany in post- 

 Tournefortian times whose minds appear to have been under the 

 same delusion, and who thereby missed one of the fundamentals 

 of the philosophy of botanical history. 



It is impossible that men, even the most primeval and unlettered, 

 manage their affairs with various denizens of the plant world 

 without classifying them. Names of plants, generic and specific, 

 and also other names more comprehensive, are a part of the ver- 

 nacular of every tribe of the uncivilized, as well as of that of every 

 rural province within the bounds of civilization to-day. The very 

 names attest the fact of classification; for no name is that of an 

 individual plant. It is that of a group of plants, always; a group 

 specific, generic, or more comprehensive than either. 



It may occur to some that the named groups recognized by the 

 untaught do not in their delimitation correspond to those that 

 obtain with the professional plant taxonomist; as if that, if it were 

 true, would in the least alter the situation or affect the argument. 

 It will be difficult to understand how the vernacular genera of the 



