LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 41 



industrial uses, and at the same time the characteristic superficial 

 — as we should now say morphological — marks, of many new trees, 

 there was yet no book of botany extant, in as far as I can learn, in 

 which it was taught that any and every tree that has an acorn for a 

 fruit is hereby known to be a Quercus. Neither Pliny nor Tourne- 

 fort, nor any author of the fifteen centuries that intervene between 

 those two, has fewer than three distinct genera of acorn-bearing 

 trees. With each and all of them a tree bearing acorns, in order that 

 it may be of the genus Quercus, must be deciduous, and its foliage 

 sinuately lobed. In other words, none but deciduous white oaks 

 are properly called oaks by these old authorities. Trees bearing 

 acorns, but evergreen as to foliage, the leaf margins prickly, are 

 of a separate genus, Ilex; while those oaks of southern Europe with 

 peculiar foliage, along with a thick spongy bark, — cork oaks, we call 

 them, — are of a third genus, Suber. At the time, therefore, when 

 Banister was turning into Latin those English binary names which 

 colonists had given to Virginian trees bearing acorns, there was 

 not yet a book of botany extant in which it was taught that its 

 yielding acorns was a sufficient warrant for naming a tree an oak. 

 It was only the country people, the woodmen, who held that view 

 as to the extent of the genus Oak. The learned John Ray, the 

 same who received from Banister the manuscript catalogue of 

 Virginian plants and caused it to be published, himself never 

 swerved from the doctrine then time-honored and classic, that we 

 have here three genera, Quercus , Ilex, and Suber, yet expressly states 

 that " the common people so extend the name Quercus as to include 

 under it all kinds of trees that bear acorns."^ In as far as I have 

 been able to trace the history of oak classifying on the part of pro- 

 fessional botanists, Linnseus appears to have been the very first 

 to repudiate what had been the opinion of all his predecessors, and 

 to adopt as more true to nature the more comprehensive genus 

 Quercus which the vulgus had invented. And so, if we of the pres- 

 ent, following Linnasus as to the limits of Quercus, are in the right, 

 then let us concede freely the fact, from which there is no escape, 

 that during long centuries the unlettered vulgus was taxonomically 

 correct, while all the learned botanists were wrong. 



By means of the popular nomenclature of common ornamental 

 plants, one is able to see how those uninstructed in botany readily 

 classify things according to floral structure. Everywhere lovers of 

 flowers have a group of plants which they call by the collective 

 name of lily. This happens to be many times more comprehensive 



[^ ' '^Ray, Historia Plantarum, vol.^ii, 1385 (1683). 



