DATURAS SAFFORD. 541 



carry in his hand one of its flowers ; so that the Chinese came to call 

 the flower by the name of the star. Li Shi-Chen gives a pretty good 

 description of the plant, which he says has leaves resembling those 

 of an egg plant, flowers with a white hexagonal corolla, blooming in 

 the eighth month (September), and round prickly fruits; but this 

 description is corrected b} T a Japanese botanist, Ono Ranzan, who 

 says that the flower is normally pentagonal instead of hexagonal : 

 and this correction is sustained by Siinuma Yokusai, another au- 

 thority on old Japanese botany, who gives a very good illustration 

 of the flower in question (fig. 1). identifying it with the white- 

 flowered form of Datura metel, known to the Japanese by the name 

 of Chosen-asagao, or " Korean morning-glory." 8 



Matsumara, a Japanese botanist, has recently called attention to the 

 fact that another vernacular name applied to the white-flowered 

 shiro chosen-asagao is mandarago ; and Dr. Tyozaburo Tanaka. to 

 whom I am indebted for the above account of this plant; informs me 

 that the latter name is nothing else than the Buddhistic pronuncia- 

 tion of Li Shi-Chen's man tfo lo kua. undoubtedly derived from the 

 narcotic "mandragora," so famous during the Middle Ages. 



ORIGIN OF THE NAME DATURA. 



It was this Asiatic "metel-nut" called in India Dhatura, or Dutra, 

 that gave its name to the genus. In the Hortus Cliffortianus of 

 Linnaeus (1737) it appears as Datura pericarpiis nutantibus globosis, 

 or Datura with nodding globose pericarps, or fruits ; and the flowers 

 were described as varying in color, with a simple white corolla, a 

 simple purple corolla, a double or triple purple corolla, or a double 

 corolla white within and purple on the outside. 



True to his principle of not adopting a barbarous word for a 

 generic name. Linnaeus latinized the East Indian Dhatura, or Dutra, 

 by giving it the form Datura, explaining the name by the following 

 pun : " Daturae, licet originis sit peregrinae, vocabulum persistere 

 valet, cum a latina derivari potest ; dantur et daturae forte in Indiis 

 posthac semina a lascivis foeminis maritis inertibus." 9 



CONFUSION OF SPECIFIC NAMES. 



After reading the above reference to the use of the Asiatic Datura 

 as a narcotic and identifying with it the Datura metel described by 

 Linnaeus in the first edition of his Species Plantarum b} r means of 

 the descriptions and figures cited by Linnaeus, it seems strange that 

 botanists should have abandoned the valid name Datura metel for 



8 It is interesting to note in tliis place that Datura stramonium, the common Jamestown 

 weed, which many botanists believe to be of Asiatic origin is called in Japan yoshu chosen- 

 asagao, yoshu, signifying " foreign." 



"Linnaeus, Hort. Cliffort, p. 50, 1737. 



