ANALOGIES AND AFFINITIES. 
i 
That familiar tenant of summer pools and muddy shores, 
the common Water Plantain, known to the botanists of two 
hundred and fifty and three hundred years since by the name 
Plantago aquatica) which Linnæus, to perpetuate the old 
name called Alisma Plantago aquatica? (the emendators of 
Linnseus having cut it down to the strict binomial Alisma 
Plantago*), bears only the most superficial likeness to cer- 
tain species of Plantago. Such a name for the plant, and 
such a place in the system of vegetal forms could have been 
assigned it only by men who had yet to learn that the marks 
of general affinity lie not in the mere externals of leaf-outline, 
venation, habit, or habitat. 
In the year 1583 the Italian Cxsalpinus enunciated the 
principle that in the fruit and seed of plants are to be found 
the true indices of affinity; a principle which lies at the 
bottom of every system of plant classification which has since 
been proposed; and the discovery entitles Cæsalpinus to the 
honor of having been the founder of the science of systematic 
botany. 
The Cesalpinian teaching having been received, it was 
inevitable that the Water Plantain should be dissociated from 
the species of Plantago. In its fructification it had nothing 
puso eed eee A ee S e EREA EN 
1 Brunfels, i. 24 (1530); Ruellius, 574 ( 1536); Fuchs, 42 (1543); Tragus, 
296 (1552); Camer., 264 (1558); Dod., 606 (1583). 
? Linn., Sp. Pl. ed. 1, 342 (1753); Crantz, Inst. ii. 449 (1766); Hill, Hort. 
Kew. 161 (1769); Geertn., Fruet. et Sem. ii. 22 (1802). 
3 Scopoli, Carn. ed. 2. i. 266 (1772); Ait, Hort. Kew. i. 492 (1789); 
Moench, Meth. 219 (1794). 
293 Issued May 31, 1889. 
