296 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



new accessions, not of plants newly discovered, but of such as had 

 been known very anciently but not admitted to the group, but now 

 ready to be received because new and truer criteria of relation- 

 ship were being exploited, and gaining recognition. Cordus, as we 

 have seen, had been the discoverer of the papilionaceous flower — 

 the expression tells but the truth — and one immediate result of the 

 discovery was, the augmentation of the ancient group of the legu- 

 mina by the referring thereto of every genus the mere form and 

 plan of whose corolla was at agreement with that of beans and peas. 

 Anthology, dormant if not dead for fifteen centuries, has come to 

 life, is developing with some rapidity, and the ancient taxonomy 

 that had been constructed largely according to vegetative characters, 

 culinary uses, and medicinal properties, is being steadily but 

 quietly displaced. The chief agent of this radical taxonomical 

 Reform at this period is Valerius Cordus. We must follow him in 

 his bringing in of one other new accession to the family of the legu- 

 minous. The type had been well known to the ancient Greeks. 

 They had given it the name which, as a genus, it has always borne 

 from their day to ours, Glycyrrhiza, Sweetroot. No use was known 

 for any part of the plant but its root. Anciently no one would 

 have called it a leguminous plant ; and for this very reason Cordus 

 argues the case of its proper admissibility to membership in the 

 family. In the place of a concluding note, supplementing a fine 

 description of the plant in all its parts, in the course of which he has 

 announced having found the flowers, though small and crowded, to 

 be precisely papilionaceous, he says, "The roots have a very sweet 

 flavor, moderately astringent, and a trifle acrid, to which there is 

 added the mere trace^of a certain bitterness that belongs to all 

 leguminous plants ; for even this plant is as certainly referable to 

 the leguminosae as the peas and beans themselves ; in view of which 

 decision it seems fitting that I should make mention of this one 

 sensible quality that it has in common with all the leguminosae ; for 

 perhaps not every one would prove to have the sense of taste suf- 

 ficiently cultivated to be able to perceive it and attest its presence. "^ 

 One is obliged to pause a moment in admiration of the calm, 

 judicious conservatism of this youthful botanical genius, as it 

 reveals itself in the last of those lines. He has discovered, and as 

 modestly as possible he announces the discovery, that by their 

 floral structures alone the family relationships of hosts of plant 

 genera may be determined, and unmistakably. The detection of a 



• Hist. PL, p. 1642. 



