22 D1VI BOTANICI. 



the perfection of his judgment matured by experience. He enjoins, 

 with manifest propriety, that, in Botany, generic names should not 

 be abused by conferring them on saints or men renowned in any 

 other art or science, in order to prolong the remembrance of such 

 persons or to court their favour ; from the certainty that, with 

 regard to the former, the greatest of such saints were generally the 

 grossest sinners : that the generic names borrowed from the fables 

 of ancient poets, or from the fabulous designations of their heathen 

 deities, who originally were illustrious mortals, for the reason that 

 these names commonly had reference to the exercise of some good 

 disposition or to the result of some beneficent action : that the appel- 

 lations consecrated to the memory of kings, princes and great men, 

 who have promoted the knowledge of Botany, deserve to be retain- 

 ed : and that the generic names made to commemorate the merits 

 of excellent botanists, universally ought to be held sacred ; for, as 

 this is the only and the best reward of their labours, it should be 

 viewed with reverential estimation, and dispensed to those solely 

 who have effected valuable improvements in Botany, that others 

 may be thereby induced to cultivate and adorn the science. 



From a remote period in the History of Herbs, the plant Musa 

 obtained its name from a modification of the term by which it was 

 popularly known in those intertropical regions where it grows, 

 indigenous and abundant ; but, in harmony with the foregoing 

 Rules, and without change in the orthography, this appellation was 

 expressly determined by the authority of Linnaeus himself, that it 

 should be, in his System, the memorial of a " great man" who 

 endeavoured " to promote the knowledge of Botany" by explaining 

 the qualities of a salutary vegetable, and to extend the benefits of 

 medicine by imparting an extraordinary contribution to its resources. 

 Now, this justly honoured individual was 



Musa the Physician. — Habitually animated by the insatiable 

 spirit of Democracy, the Rulers of the Roman Republic intuitively 

 approved and zealously promoted the inherent selfishness and feroci- 

 ty of a Sovereign People, by the device of ordinances for perpetuat- 

 ing a system of the mjst cruel and iniquitous despotism — the des- 

 potism of Slavery,* with all its atrocities and diabolical abomina- 



" With powerless or pennyless declaimers, it has long been the unworthy 

 custom to revile the memory of Julius Csesar, the dictator, with loud and 

 liberal abuse, as the extinguisher of his country's liberties. Nevertheless, it 

 was this celebrated personage, alike distinguished as a soldier, a statesman, 

 and a scholar, who exercised a high moral intrepidity in modifying the injviy - 



