LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE lip 



tree or shrub or herb he used that name by which it was known 

 in the everyday speech of Greeks. It does not appear that it ever 

 occurred to him that a living thing, or any group of living things, 

 required to be named otherwise than as commonly designated in 

 his mother tongue. When in reading his books one encounters 

 batrachium, erigeron, lithospermum, leucoium, myriophyllum, 

 myrrhis, narcissus, and a hundred more as familiar, it is because he 

 knew no other names for them. Nevertheless Theophrastus has 

 great part in what is now come to be received as the scientific 

 nomenclature of the genera and species of plants; and if this has 

 come to pass without forethought or purpose on his own part, it 

 is still natural and was inevitable. During some two centuries 

 next succeeding the writing of it, this was almost the only treatise 

 on botany that was extant, and the names of plants therein written 

 about obtained by that very fact great prestige. When at length 

 the Latins began to study plants, and would write about them, 

 they had to learn Greek in order to be able to read the works of 

 Theophrastus, for that was the one supreme treatise on plants. 

 All well-known plants were therefore known to Latins by their 

 Theophrastan and Greek names, as well as by their Latin names 

 when they had such. Pliny, the supreme Latin writer about 

 plants, in translating Theophrastan texts by the hundred into 

 Latin for Roman readers, made use of familiar Latin names in place 

 of the Greek names when there were such, e. g., instead of the 

 Greek itea he wrote salix; in place of drys, quercus; Latin ulmus, 

 sambucus, and ranunculus in place of Theophrastan ptelea, acte, 

 and batrachium. There were still many scores of plant types 

 which were known to Latins by no other names than those that 

 had been assigned them in Greek; another evidence that Theo- 

 phrastus by his books had been the one teacher and authority 

 upon botany to Latins as well as Greeks. Platanus, cerasus, 

 rhamnus, anemone, thalictrum, delphinium, helleborus, paeonia, 

 and a host of other such remained the only names of the genera, 

 whether one spoke or wrote botany in Latin or in Greek; and so 

 during some seventeen centuries most of the plant names in use 

 were quoted from Theophrastus. The popular fable about 

 Linnaeus as first nomenclator of botany is not yet a hundred years 

 old, and will need to be perpetuated for sixteen centuries yet to 

 come if the years of his nomenclatorial fame are to equal those 

 during which Theophrastus held the prestige. 



Early in the sixteenth century, when new impulses moved men 

 everywhere to scientific research, Latin had now long been the 



