124 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



by its closely imitative "root," and then on account of the aro- 

 matic properties of that root to call the plant ndXufuog ivoffjxog. 

 It is equally incredible that Theophrastus should have adjudged 

 the service tree which grew on Mount Ida to be a kind of fig tree. 

 The country people who found the sweet fruits in some way sug- 

 gestive of figs must have been the creators of that name fftmtj 'ISaia. 

 But the author who desires to conciliate the public will use great 

 reserve in the matter of suppressing, altering, or even amending 

 established and familiar names; and Theophrastus left plant 

 nomenclature as he found it. And what reasonable objection 

 could have been raised against such binary generic names? It 

 can hardly have entered his mind that it made any difference 

 whether such name were one-worded or two-worded. Outside 

 the domain of our Latin-worded technicalities it makes not the 

 least difi^erence to any of us to-day how many words go to the 

 making of a generic name. Ivy is a generic name, and as certainly 

 such are Ground Ivy and Poison Ivy. Pine, Ground Pine, and 

 Princes' Pine are names of three genera in no wise interrelated. 

 The same may be said of the five following, Pink, Moss Pink, Squaw 

 Pink, Mullein Pink, and Pink Root. We having no fault to find with 

 such generic names as Star of Bethlehem, Lily of the Valley, Grape 

 Hyacinth, Jerusalem Artichoke, Indian Turnip, American Cowslip, 

 and some scores of others like them. We are a living illustration 

 of Theophrastus in this regard, except that we have two languages 

 for our botany, whereas he had but one. We have two languages 

 in which we use botanical names, with a separate set of rules for 

 each. Into our Latin nomenclature we do not admit any of these 

 two-worded generic names which we use so freely and so readily 

 in our vernacular. In this we differ from a very long and illus- 

 trious line of our own botanical ancestry. It is less than two 

 hundred years since what we know in English as Dogtooth 

 Violet and in Latin as Erythronium was in all Latin botany the 

 genus Dens Canis, Taraxacum was Dens Leonis, Convallaria was 

 Lilium Convallium, Glechoma was Hedera Terrestris, Helianthus 

 Flos Solis, Drosera Ros Solis, Centaurea was Centaurium Majus, 

 and the little gentianceous genus Erythra^a was Centaurium Minus. 

 By the same token, Chelidonium was the genus Chelidonium Majus 

 and Ficaria was the genus Chelidonium Minus. In a word, Latin 

 botany for more than seventeen centuries admitted two-worded 

 generic names as freely as the simpler kind; and all after the ex- 

 ample of Theophrastus and the prehistoric nomenclators. 



This is not the place in which to give the history of the elimina- 



