244 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



efficacy as an insectifuge, and partly because its stems are almost 

 or quite prostrate; for in this antique classification by vegetative 

 characters the very posture of stems was regarded as a weighty 

 consideration, as we shall see later. 



In the treatment of these plants now long known as the family 

 of the LahiatcB, Tragus, quite as if he had recognized the family 

 and wished to keep the members of it in as close juxtaposition as 

 possible, again does violence to one of the very fundamentals of the 

 old system to which he has professed fealty. Rosemary and 

 lavender are genera of labiates, square-stemmed, opposite-leaved, 

 aromatic, and have the flowers and fruits of labiates, but they are 

 shrubs; at least rosemary is, and the lavenders are strongly suf- 

 frutescent; therefore the proper place for them is away in Tragus' 

 Third Book, among the woody growths, where also we find plenty 

 of growths that are both smaller and less woody than either of 

 rosemary or lavender; but he has both these here in the First Book, 

 at the end of the line of the labiates, all the rest of which are herbs. 



With this ending of the series of the labiates we are brought to 

 about the sixtieth of our one hundred sample pages. The num- 

 ber of genera embraced within the fifty-nine pages is eighteen. 

 All are genera of Labiates except the first, and that is Urtica, 

 We have already seen how nettles and dead nettles were primitively 

 regarded as of one and the same genus. The conceding that the 

 two were generically distinct did not necessitate any wide sundering 

 of them. The close resemblance between them as to vegetative 

 organs, and the clustering of the flowers in the leaf-axils, betokened 

 still a close consanguinity. To Tragus and his contemporaries the 

 transition from Urtica to Lamium, so far from seeming to be 

 abrupt, was a perfectly easy and natural one 



That close against the aromatic labiates of herb and drug gardens 

 Valeriana should be located is not so difficult to explain, now that 

 we have Tragus' point of view; for the valerians, at least as to 

 their basal and underground parts, are notably odoriferous; they 

 are not indistinctly square-stemmed, their leaves are opposite, 

 their inflorescence is of the verticillastrate type, and their flowers 

 are bilabiate. 



At this juncture the series of the square-stemmed and opposite- 

 leaved is briefly interrupted. The intercalated genera are Asarum, 

 Geum, and Ruta. But in the primitive classifyings aromatic pro- 

 perties were much deferred to, and inasmuch as this whole series, 

 all the way from Lamium to Ruta, is a line of aromatic plants, the 

 three above named do not interrupt it save only as to stem and leaf 



