LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 189 



SO much as heard, or even thought the phrase "botanical nomen- 

 clature." The laws governing the naming of plants were not 

 different from those observed in the naming of other things. All 

 that we may gather by observing his procedure along these 

 lines may be the course w^hich a cultivated and philosophic mind, 

 unhampered by prejudices, will naturally take. But such a study 

 will be well worth while ; because one does not often meet with an 

 author who so nearly antedates all our stereotyped conventionalities, 

 and takes his own course so little influenced by traditions and 

 prejudices. Without having enunciated one of them, he seems 

 to have been more or less under the guidance of principles like the 

 following : 



1. That for the science of botany there is an initial book; 

 that is the Historia Plantarum of Theophrastus of Eresus. He 

 quotes that work constantly, but never, I think, any earlier book 

 or author. Others of Brunfels' time and a little later we shall find 

 citing Moses, Solomon, and other Hebrew writers as if these had 

 been botanists; but not so Brunfels, who, notwithstanding his train- 

 ing in theology, and the distinction he had won as a Biblical scholar 

 and commentator, does not intimate that he has found botany 

 in Holy Scripture, and never cites an author who antedates Theo- 

 phrastus. It will not, however, follow that he must adopt The- 

 phrastan generic names in such wise as to make that author's 

 monumental work the point of departure for nomenclature. The 

 existence of an historically first book of botanical science is one 

 thing. The having a starting point for an universal nomenclature 

 of botany is quite another; and the two are both logically separ- 

 able and historically separate. Brunfels was well informed about the 

 historic beginnings of botany; but the idea of an universal 

 system of nomenclature for groups of plants had not in his day 

 been conceived. 



2, Brunfels writes in Latin. The text of his book is for those 

 who know Latin, and, knowing it, know things by their Latin 

 names. The writer is under the necessity of using the Latin names 

 of plants rather than those by which the same plants are known 

 in Greek or Hebrew, Arabic or Persian. If a man pretending to 

 write in Latin about animals should write hippos instead of equus, 

 or alopex in place of vulpes, he would stultify himself; would be 

 writing unintelligibly, absurdly, and ridiculously. It is not imagin- 

 able that Brunfels, in a Latin book of botany, should have done 

 so insanely as to write drys instead of quercus, or kittos in place of 

 hedera, ion rather than viola, or arnoglossa rather than plantago. 



