5o 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



false Solomon's seal, the yellow bellflower, the Dutchman's Beinkleider 

 and many other common American plants are similarly illustrated in 

 this quaint old volume. 



The early days are famous for certain quaint and interesting 

 collectors of curios brought in by sea-captains and other early sailors 

 from the four corners of the earth. Among these old-time naturalists 

 were Petiver and Plukenet, who filled huge folios with miscellaneous 

 illustrations of plants and animals from all over the world. 



We reproduce here a single plate from the latter which is just now 

 interesting because it figures a fern peculiar to the caves of Bermuda, 

 and named from that circumstance {Poly podium speluncce L.), but 

 one which jugglers of the past generation of botanists have placed 

 outside its proper species, genus and even tribe, and have attributed 

 to nearly all parts of the tropical world except, alas, the very island 

 from which it originally came! We should mention in this connec- 

 tion the ' Natural History of Jamaica,' by Sir Hans Sloane, whose 

 plates are typified by his Jamaica herbarium over two hundred years 

 old, but still in a splendid state of preservation at the British Museum; 

 and also the work of Charles Plumier, who laid the foundations of 

 West Indian botany as early as 1703, and whose works are of vital im- 

 portance to-day in our study of the flora of our tropical islands. Later 

 on Mark Catesby explored the Bahamas and Carolina and published 

 with elaborate folio plates many of the characteristic plants and ani- 

 mals of those little explored regions. 



The conception of a plant genus as a coherent group of species 

 apparently became crystallized by Tournefort, who published his Insti- 

 tutiones in 1700; in this work he gave many illustrations accompanied 

 by descriptive text in this first genera plantarum. Tournefort, like 

 many modern botanists, knew mainly the higher plants, and it was 

 reserved for Micheli (1729) to open the eyes of his fellow students to 

 the genera of fungi, hepatics and lichens, and to Dillen (1744) to 

 give us a foundation for the study of the mosses and the lycopodiums. 

 The plates of Dillen's Historia Muscorum show what he knew about 

 mosses with a hand lens a hundred and sixty-three years ago, and we 

 give a sample plate from Micheli showing the symmetric rows of slime 

 molds of the genera Stemonitis and Arcyria of modern botanical 

 jargon. When the next generation, less hurried and temporizing than 

 the present, comes to take up the question of plant nomenclature in 

 a really rational fashion, these names of Tournefort and Micheli will 

 be restored to their rightful place in a system that makes priority of 

 publication its corner stone! 



All this vast array of early botanical literature, ranging from 

 ponderous folios with plates, often colored by hand, down to miniature 

 Elzevir editions, with typography that puts the modern imitations to 



