LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 209 



introduced into Europe, where it was known only by the Italian 

 name of Stramonia. Since it has no Greek name he locates it where 

 he will; and we who have been taught that there was no natural 

 classifying of plants until well toward the end of the eighteenth 

 century may well be surprised that Fuchsius places this at the end 

 of a line which begins with Solanum nigrum, such perfectly solana- 

 ceous types Solanum melongena, Physalis somnifera, and Atropa 

 Belladonna intervening. 



That very early in the sixteenth century there was already in 

 exercise the taxonomic skill to put together as under one com- 

 prehensive natural genus such diverse-looking consanguinities as 

 the five plants here named is something that merits more than 

 passing notice. It is another of those forceful intimations that 

 much of the botanical history we once learned must be unlearned. 

 Let us remember that we are now at a point more than one hundred 

 and fifty years anterior to those great lights, Morison, Ray, and 

 Tournefort, and some two hundred anterior to Haller, Jttssieu, and 

 Adanson, to which latter trio is usually accorded all the glory of 

 having first outlined such natural groups as this. But Fuchsius 

 himself intimates that from very ancient times there had been a 

 somewhat familiar knowledge of four out of these five plants, and 

 says that both Dioscorides and Galenos had held them to be 

 kinds of ffrpvx^ov, i.e., Solanum} But the referring of so marked 

 a new type of plant as Datura to the anciently recognized group of 

 the Solanum allies by men of the sixteenth century will hardly fail 

 to suggest to some that there must have been, after all, some appeal 

 to anthology. Certainly the conventional nineteenth-century 

 botanist finds no stronger links uniting these two plants to one 

 family than the symmetrical pentamery of the flower, coinciding 

 with a plicate praefloration and superior ovary. It is none the less, 

 well beyond question that not a single point anthological had in- 

 fluence in determining the affinities of Datura. The corolla has not 

 yet, at this period obtained its name. It is still the "flower" 

 simply. Neither stamen nor style had been taken note of as an; 

 individual organ; much less had the two been distinguished, or the 

 members of either set been counted. Floral sym^metry was yet 

 unnoticed; and, marked as is the aestivation, or praefloration of 

 solanum and all its allies, the very topic of praefloration was not 

 yet heard of in Fuchsius' time, nor did it begin to figure in taxonomy 

 until some two centuries after his demise. According to Fuchsius, 



1 Hist. Stirp., p. 691. 



