36 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



fer to Banister's Catalogue. ^ This contains a list of binary names 

 of Virginian oaks, such as Quercus alba, Q. rubra, Q. Hispanica. Q. 

 castaneosjolia, Q. salicijolia. Now while a casual reader of the 

 catalogue cited would, without a second thought about the matter, 

 attribute those five names to Banister, it is extremely unlikely 

 that any one of them was invented by him. It is next to certain 

 that the whole five are his mere translations into Latin of the oak 

 names that he found in use among the colonists. Perhaps the 

 plainest proof of this is, in that by turning those five binary names 

 back into English you get precisely the names by which five com- 

 mon oaks are known to dwellers in that same region now, two 

 hundred and twenty-seven years after Banister's having written 

 his list. It is really evidence that is incontestable. To dispute it 

 would be to affirm that the names were made by Banister himself, in 

 Latin, then turned into English for the use of the woodsmen settlers; 

 that these had been waiting sixty years or more for the professional 

 botanist to come and tell them by what names to call their several 

 kinds of oak; each part of which proposition, like the whole of it, 

 is absurd. Under pressure of necessity, and from the outset, they 

 must have begun to learn the different qualities of the wood or 

 timber of those strange new kinds of oak. One or two of them 

 were found comparable with the familiar oak of the mother country 

 as being hard, durable, subserving the purposes of the builder, the 

 wheelwright, and the cabinet-maker; another, not subject to decay 

 when set into the ground, useful for posts; still another durable 

 only when used for bars, rails, and like purposes; and there may 

 have been a fourth and fifth kind excellent for winter fuel, but 

 nearly worthless otherwise. No man will pretend to believe that 

 colonial woodmen and handicraftsmen, learning by degrees the 

 different qualities and uses of our various American oaks, did not 

 immediately assign a particular name to each particular kind. 

 The important industries of house-building, boat-building, cabinet- 

 making, the constructing of vehicles, the building of fences, and 

 the providing of the winter's fuel, all demanded quite imperatively 

 that there be a well ordered and generally accepted system of 

 woodmen's nomenclature of oaks as well as of other genera 

 of timber trees. So it came to pass that all important trees 

 everywhere, in America quite as elsewhere, had their established 

 names before the arrival of the writers of floras and silvas; and 

 there is many a kind of tree the Latin name of which bears the 



• Banister, Cat. Plant. Virg., transmitted from Virginia to John Ray in 1680; 

 published by Ray, in Hist., vol. ii, in 1688. 



