LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 2^ 



until the middle of the seventeenth century. Now clover was 

 from the first the name of an assemblage of individuals; if of in- 

 dividual plants of several somewhat different kinds all exhibiting 

 the common leaf character then it was what it now long has been — 

 a generic name. It ought to seem superfluous to say that clover is 

 just as much a generic name as Trifolium, and that white clover, 

 red clover, and alsike clover are as perfectly binary specific names as 

 Trifolium repens, T. pratense, and T. hybridum; but, as I have 

 intimated already, the curious notion is here and there prevalent 

 that a genus is not a genus, nor a species a species, until it obtain 

 a Latin name. I have thought desirable to indicate thus plainly the 

 incontestable fact that to the most primitive and untaught of herds- 

 men and cultivators, in their close dependence upon many mem- 

 bers of the plant world, generic names and specific are as much a 

 necessity, and as certainly in e very-day use, as they are with us 

 their school-taught posterity who call ourselves botanists. The 

 true philosophy of botanical history seems to call for special in- 

 sistence on this fact; as also that the viewing of a number of related 

 genera, and the speaking of them under a family name, is likewise 

 of a very remote antiquity. The English collective plant name 

 "pulse" is as old as the language itself, as covering under a mono- 

 syllable all the sorts of peas, beans, vetches, and lentils. It is 

 nothing less than a family name, invented as a means of briefly 

 designating the whole natural group of those cultivated plants of 

 various genera which, in recent botany, are called Papilionaceae. 

 Ancient Latin writers, to whom many genera of umbelliferous 

 plants were known familiarly, saw plainly their interrelationship 

 and called the whole assemblage of them the Ferulaceas, naming it 

 after the well-known genus Ferula which, as a genus, is represented 

 by several species in the Mediterranean flora. And all this the 

 Latins had only borrowed from a still more ancient Greek botany; 

 for the Greeks had known as well the genus Ferula under the name 

 Narthex, and were used to speak of the whole line of related genera 

 as the Narthecodes. 



From these two or three lucid examples of the naturalness of 

 plant classifying taken from the records of antiquity, let us pro- 

 ceed to make some enquiry into like usages as they obtain among 

 the most untaught in our own time. It is improbable that there 

 may not be found in every country of the Old World peasant peo- 

 ples who, entirely uninfluenced by books or schools, have never- 

 theless each some rudimentary system of botany; some terms 

 expressive of their own classify ings of plants, at least such kinds of 



