328 swingle: the wood-apple, feronia limonl\ 



be invalid, being a mere variant of Limonium. Linnaeus in the 

 1754 edition of Genera Plantarum, (ed.5,p. 135) reduced the latter 

 name to a synonym of Statice, and consequently this name or any 

 variant of it cannot be revived for any plant not congeneric with 

 the type of the original Limonium."^ As a matter of fact, Limo- 

 nium has recently been resuscitated in its original sense and is 

 now so used by many taxonomists. 



Even if we assume that Linnaeus with his well-known aversion 

 to barbarous names^ had latinized the name Limon, the usual pre- 

 Linnaean name of the lemon, we would still be forced to conclude 

 that he had brought it into a correct Latin form, just as he did in 

 changing Anona, derived from an aboriginal American name, to 

 Annona, a classical Latin word.^ This would mean that he had 

 transferred Pliny's Latin name Limonia'^ to a quite different plant, 

 the East Indian wood-apple, in accordance with a reprehensible 

 practice often followed by him. In this case, the Latin name 

 Limonia would still be a mere variant of Limonium, even though 

 derived indirectly from the barbarous word Limon. 



Limonia then being invalid, the next oldest generic name must 

 be taken up. This is Feronia, published by Correa in 1800, the 

 name now commonly used. 



Since the wood-apple was first published as Schinus Limonia 

 by Linnaeus in 1753, the oldest valid name of the wood-apple is 

 Feronia Limonia (L.) n. comb. 



^ Cook, O. F. Nomenclature of the Sapote and the Sapodilla, in Contrib. U. S. 

 Nat. Herb. 16: 282 (no. 11, December 13, 1913). 



' Linnaeus, C. Philosophia Botanica, p. 163, U 229, Stockholm., 1751. 



^ Safford, W. E. The genus Annona: The derivation of its name and its taxo- 

 nomic subdivisions. This Journal 1: 118 (n. 4, September 19, 1911). 



^ Limonia and Limonium were both used by Pliny as names of plants and were 

 derived from the Greek XeLfMoivla and \eiixuvLov, the feminine and neuter forms of 

 the adjective 'keificovios from "o 'Keiixdov a grassy plain, meadow, prairie. The Greeks 

 used both the feminine and the neuter forms as substantives, 'jj XeLfxuipla being a 

 kind of anemone, to XeinuvLov a Statice, both plants characteristic of meadows. 

 The feminine and neuter forms of the adjective were so differently accentuated 

 in Greek that there was no danger of confusing the two words when used as sub- 

 stantives. In Latin this difference in accent was lost and confusion rendered 

 possible. It is noteworthy that even in Greek only one of the similarly accented 

 masculine and neuter forms of the adjective (Xei^uwi'tos and XeL/xojvLov) was used as 

 a noun. 



