Tue WINTER HELLEBORE, AND OTHER BIBLIOGRAPHIC 
NOTEs. 
That interesting little perennial of earliest spring, known 
to botanists of the present as Eranthis hyemalis, Salisb., has 
a long history in books, and had to no little degree, and 
before Linneeus, exercised the minds of systematists as to 
its affinities. By some it had been placed in Ranunculus, 
by some in Aconitum, and by others in Helleborus. Linnzus 
was among those who were able to see in Helleborus its 
nearest affinity ; accordingly, he placed it under that name, 
and called it H. hyemalis, adopting as its specific adjective 
one which had very early been associated with it under 
Aconitum ; for it is the Aconitum hyemale, Camerarius, Epit. 
828 (1586). 
In so far as the bibliographers have shown, the plant was 
received by all authors after Linnseus (with the exception of 
Adanson), as a true Helleborus, until the early part of the 
nineteenth century, at which period three different authors, 
apparently strangers to one another and working inde- 
pendently, within the space of six years, proposed its segre- 
gation from Helleborus and its reception in the rank of a 
genus. It is the type of Eranthis, Salisb. (1807), of Kællea, 
Biria (1811), and of Robertia, Merat (1813). 
Although Eranthis has been received, all through the now 
closing century, as the name of the genus, because of its 
priority, still the Adansonian Helleboroides, being more than 
forty years older, would long since have displaced Eranthis 
had it not been such a name as the Linnean code of nomen- 
clature rules out. We can not, under Linnæus, adopt or 
employ any proposed generic name which is made by the 
Prrrowia, Vol. III. Pages 151-158. Issued 9 April, 1897. 
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