THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 17 



grape, the poison ivy, the hydrangeas the wistaria the blue 

 cohosh the may-apple, the twin-leaf, the trailing arbutus or 

 may flower, and the creeping snowberry have each a more or 

 less closely related form in eastern North America and East- 

 ern Asia but are found in no other part of the world. — Popu- 

 lar Science Monthly. 



Ancient Plant Lore. — The Assyrian King, Sard- 

 anapalus, must have been quite a book- worm if we may judge 

 from his library. Some twenty thousand stone tablets from 

 it have been dug up in the ruins of Nineveh. Those informed 

 in matters of cuneiform script report that the library is rich in 

 lists of plants and directions for their use in medicine and the 

 like. Indications seem to point to the fact that the old 

 Babylonians knew more about plants than their successors the 

 Greeks and Romans. We hope this is a mistake; otherwise 

 the "priority" people will begin to introduce these older 

 names which have been literally dug up. Who knows but what 

 we may ultimately be expected to describe our plants in 

 cuneiform characters instead of the latin now so much in 

 fashion ! 



Ups and Downs of the Name Tinker. — Evidently the 

 nomenclature game is one that several can play at and the 

 fact that nobody knows who has won until the last hand is 

 played adds to the excitement if not to the good feeling of 

 the players. A few years ago, one of our eminent botanists 

 thought a certain ancient volume gave him the right to throw 

 out Negundo as the generic name of the box elder and to re- 

 place it by the outlandish word Rulac. Recently the scholarly 

 editor of the Midland Naturalist has shown that Negundo 

 really has priority under the rules and away goes Rulac and 

 back comes Negundo. This is all very well, except that in 

 the shufile the Rulac man lost out of the combination and a 



