LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 29 



type, both as to characteristics of foliage and fruit, and as to color 

 and qualities of the wood. If one type of these peculiarly American 

 walnuts bears to-day the name of White Walnut,^ it is undoubledly 

 because the first settlers of Virginia, taking it for a probable equi- 

 valent of the English Walnut for lumbering purposes, found its wood 

 to be by comparison much lighter in color, and named the tree, after 

 the usages of lumbermen, by the color of its wood. The Black 

 Walnut 2 in like manner obtained its name from the almost blackish 

 hue of its wood compared with that of the tree of Europe.^ And 

 both these names bear distinctly the marks of an early colonial 

 origin; for no native American woodsman of however early a 

 period would have known the wood of the European Walnut so 

 as to have made the comparisons. 



From this representation of colonists as practical woodsmen — 

 beyond all cavil an essentially faithful representation — it appears 

 that men without the least training in school botany, exploring 

 the woodland resources of a new continent with none other than 

 utilitarian ends in view, find systematic botany an indispensable 

 necessity, create for themselves a serviceable system of woodland 

 taxonomy, make themselves the pioneers of taxonomic research 

 in the new field; this not, however, as using the terms taxonomy and 

 classification; not even as necessarily knowing so much as the name 

 of the science which they are practising. Let us distinguish mental 

 processes. Nothing more is here needful. He who is occupied 

 with testing wood or timber as to its economic usefulness is doing 

 the part of the industrialist. He who compares one sort of living 

 tree with another, noting by what marks of habit, of bark, of foliage 

 or of fruit the two may be distinguished, and who determines to 

 call one of them by one name and the other by some name that is 

 different, is doing exactly the work of the botanical systematist. 

 This man may never have learned a syllable of the terminology 

 employed in schools of botany. He may not have heard the Latin 

 name for oak, for maple, for poplar, or any other genus of trees, or 

 even the word genus ; but he is a botanical systematist none the less; 

 and since his business obliges him to be this he proves the utility 

 of botanical system. It is not possible for the occupations of the 

 farmer, the herdsman, or the lumberman to be carried on without 

 botanical classification and a fixed nomenclature of both genera and 

 species. Therefore those thus engaged have never at any time in 



» Juglans alba, Linn. 



2 Juglans nigra, Linn. 



3 Juglans regia, Linn. 



