LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I07 



informed as to how familiarly hundreds of useful plants were 

 known two thousand years before Brunfels would expect to find 

 so common and important a plant as Trifolium repens among that 

 number. Nevertheless, it is one of the things which Brunfels 

 presents as new to botanists.^ He says it is well dispersed through- 

 out Germany, chiefly in meadows, and is known to the common 

 people by the name of Weiss Fleischbluem ; also that his engraver 

 brought him the plant under that name. That Old German name 

 of the plant, and Brunfels' brief remark upon it, both printed 

 on the plate page, seem to constitute the earliest publication of 

 Trifolium repens.'^^ Both the botanist and the artist seem to 

 have agreed in the opinion — a purely philosophic one — that no little 

 weed was beneath botanical notice, and between them they have 

 given us the beginning of the history of Draba verna. The plant 

 is elegantly figured under the vernacular designation of Gensbluem ; 

 but not another word is said about it.^ It is, however, the first 

 record, and a perfectly definite record, of an interesting though 

 diminutive type; one that within the last century has been much 

 discussed by very able botanists who have investigated it morpho- 

 logically, taxonomically, and even as to its rightful name; and 

 that Old German popular name Gensbluem — in later German 

 Gansblum — has proven a somewhat fateful appellation. More than 

 two centuries after Brunfels had printed it, Michel Adanson pro- 

 posed its adoption as being by right of priority the lawful generic 

 name.* For two reasons, not calling for mention here, Adanson's 

 movement failed of any public approval. Yet once again, in the 

 end of the nineteenth century. Otto Kuntze renewed he Adan- 

 sonian proposition ; ^ but the attempt to reinstate Gansblum was 

 again fruitless, at least as to gaining public approval. It was not 

 a Latin-made name. Probably it did not occur to Brunfels' mind 

 that a little weed, of no use in medicine or any art, needed to be 

 dignified by any other name at all than that by which the country 

 people of Germany knew it. 



To the nomenclature of species it is evident Brunfels gave no 

 thought ; nor was there any reason why he should have given it any 

 attention. Most of the genera, with him as with the botanists of 

 antiquity, were monotypic, and the generic name was all that was 



' Herb. Viv. Icon., vol. ii, p. 55. 



2 The botanists of remote antiquity knew but one plant which they called 

 Trifolium. It figures in modem nomenclature as Psoralen bituminosa. 

 ^ Herb. Viv. Icon., vol. ii, p. 34. 



* Adanson, Families des Plantes, vol. ii, p. 420 (1763). 

 5 Kuntze, Revisio Generum., vol. i, p. 29 (1891). 



