220 THE PLANT WOELD 



World, have written upon the origin of the word columbine, but have 

 failed to arrive at what seems to the writer the true derivation of the 

 name. Mr. Saunders went wide of the mark in his " dove-cote " theory, 

 while Professor Greene also did not satisfactorily establish his theory of 

 dove's-foot as the original of columbine. Since, as he says, the Latin 

 name dove's-foot geranium was Pes columbinus, he believed the prefix 

 Pes would likewise appear before columbine, the common name of 

 Aquilegia, which is an inference rather than a fact. The generic 

 name for columbine is Aquilegia, vaguely assumed to have orig- 

 inated from the resemblance of curves of the hollow spurs of these 

 flowers to those of an eagle's talons. Dodoens wrote of these flowers 

 under the name of columbine, and remarks that they were known to the 

 ancients in Latin as Aquilegia or Aquileia, and by later writers Colum- 

 bina. It is called in English, according to Henry Lyte's translation of 

 Dodoens, 1578 : " Columbine, of the shape and proportions of the leaves 

 of the flowers, which do seem to represent the Jigure of a dove or culver. 

 In French it is Ancholy ; in High Dutch, Agley : in Low Dutch, A keley." 

 Columbine, therefore, appears to have originated in England from the 

 Latin columbinus, signifying dove or cidver. 



So far as I am able to discover in the pre-Linnaean botanical lit- 

 erature, columbine was not applied by the ancients to species of Aqui- 

 legia. The group of plants comprised in the genus Geranium produced 

 many species resembling birds' feet and bills. Herb-Robert, pink- 

 needle, storks, or crane's-bill, are closely allied with species of Aqui- 

 legia of the ancients. Aquilegia and columbine may, therefore, have 

 become later confused with the Geranium family in England. There is 

 a species of Geranium perpetuated by Linnaeus in the old binary 

 nomenclature, as Geranium columbinum, commonly known as long-stalked 

 crane's-bill, which the long seed-pod resembles. This species was first 

 known as Geranium alterum and Pes columbinus, which becomes in 

 English, dove's-foot geranium ; in French, Pied de pigeon, and in Low 

 Dutch, doyvennoet. Dodoens wrote of the group of geraniums known to 

 the ancients, and says : " These herbes of the first sort have seeds, long 

 and sharpe like a heron's-beake or bill, or storke's-bill, with leaves cut 

 and jagged in many places like crow-foot flowers." It is tme the Crow- 

 foot family to-day includes these cut and jagged leaved plants, such 

 as buttercups, columbine, larkspur, caltha, clematis, anemone, hepatica, 

 etc. The second species of geranium known to Dodoens was Geranium 

 columbinum, known as Pes columbae, or dove's-foot geranium, and " pro- 

 duced leaves like the mallow, cut around about, growing on tender hairy 

 browne stalks, and the flowers be small, of a cleere purple color, and the 

 seed pods turn into little bills, yet not so great as the crane's-beek or 

 storke's-bill geranium {Geranium tuberosum) of old." 



