40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



ruralists can possibly correspond to the Latin-named genera of 

 the scientific botanists when the latter themselves are seldom 

 at agreement among themselves as to the exact limits of any 

 considerable genus, or of any polymorphous species. When we 

 ourselves may have learned to agree as to where one of our Latin- 

 named groups is to end and the next is to begin, may we with 

 some propriety criticise the same kind of doing as accomplished 

 by the unindoctrinated. 



And now let me demonstrate it, that in the history of classification 

 the unlettered vulgus now and again has been first to arrive at 

 the satisfactory delimitation of a natural group, the learned doctors 

 having arrived at this same judgment later by one or more genera- 

 tions, and so as to seem to have adopted it from the untutored 

 laity. This point may perhaps be most easily made plain by return- 

 ing to the contemplation of North American colonial botany and the 

 colonial dendrologists. It was shown above, that all the several 

 American trees of the walnut alliance with which they became ac- 

 quainted, although all, in certain particulars, different enough 

 from that one Old World walnut which they had known, they called 

 walnuts ; precisely the same as if they had denominated them species 

 of JUGLANS, which would have been the case assuredly, had they but 

 known and used the Latin terminology in place of the English. 

 We, of three centuries later, dispose of these American trees dif- 

 ferently, referring nearly all of them to another genus; but what is 

 remarkably to the credit of that colonial and primitive taxonomy 

 is, that so exalted an authority as Linnaeus found no fault with it, 

 but simply adopted it. With him all the different kinds figure as 

 good enough species of JUGLANS, and bear with him even the. same 

 specific names which the colonists had assigned, but of course 

 Latinized. 



When, in a preceding paragraph, I gave early American colonists 

 the credit of having recognized and named as oaks a considerable list 

 of native acorn-bearing trees; even as having determined them to 

 be oaks by their acorns alone, I felt that there might be demurrers 

 to the opinion that these had not learned this mark of the genus 

 Quercus from the^schools in some more or less indirect way. I 

 may well, therefore, here place it beyond dispute that in this case 

 also the unlettered men of field and forest did arrive at the proper 

 delimitation of a genus of trees quite in advance of the professional 

 taxonomists, and these last virtually adopted the genus, as we now 

 have it, from the ruralists. In the first decade of the seventeenth 

 century, when the Virginian colonists were beginning to learn the 



