LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 3 I 



Steadily in use. As a mere prejudgment it is deeply seated in the 

 botanical mind of to-day, that nothing can be done, or ever could 

 have been done, in the direction of an orderly arranging of the 

 world of plants but by appeal to characters of flower and fruit. 

 And along with this prejudice there dwells another as deeply 

 ingrained, namely, that the flower was the same thing to botanists 

 of four hundred years ago, if not to those of three thousand years 

 since, which it is to us; whereas not yet two centuries have passed 

 since the flower began to be known. Our classifying by flower and 

 fruit was fairly established while as yet the corolla was regarded as 

 the principal part of the flower, and was in fact the synonym for 

 flower, without even its name corolla. 



Something may be done towards undermining these prejudices 

 by giving a few examples of primitive systematizing as undertaken 

 while as yet the flower, as to its essentials and its functions, re- 

 mained an undiscovered organ. 



For a good illustration of classifying by leaf characters alone, 

 those of flower and fruit being quite ignored, we need go no farther 

 back than the later years of the sixteenth century and the first 

 quarter of the seventeenth. Let us limit ourselves to the forty years 

 intervening between 1583 and 1623; also inspecting certain pages 

 of two of the widely known and thoroughly approved professional 

 botanists of the time, Rembert Dodonseus and Caspar Bauhin. 

 The genus Clover, in ancient Latin Trifolium, in Greek Triphyllon, 

 already referred to in this chapter, is an ample one with the authors 

 named. Bauhin's book contains names and descriptions of some 

 sixty species ; and since both he and Dodonaeus are almost as strict 

 adherents of binary nomenclature as was Linnaeus himself who 

 came into this field of nomenclature a century later, it will be easy 

 to show what they received into the genus Trifolium by presenting 

 here two opposite columns of binary names. In as far as they 

 admitted to their Clover genus genuine clovers as we now un- 

 derstand them, the reproduction of their names need not be made. 



Dodonaeus (1583), and Bauhin (1623) Recent Names 



Trifolium bituminosum Psoralea bituminosa. 



Trifolium odoratum Melilotus officinalis. 



Trifolium corniculatum Lotus corniculatus. 



Trifolium cochleatum Medicago orbicularis. 



Trifolium palustre Menyanthes trifoliata. 



Trifolium acetosum Oxalis acetosella. 



Trifolium hepaticum Hepatica triloba. 



