CITING ANCIENT AUTHORS. 197 



the contrary fact is so manifest ; yet how else shall one 

 interpret the rather vague statement that the ancients used 

 their names "as mere appellations for plants?*' The expres- 



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sion is at best not a forcible one to have introduced into an 

 argument. I do not see that the best new generic name 

 coined by Tournefort in his day, or any or all of the specific 

 binomials either adopted or proposed by Linn^us, are any- 

 thing more than '•'mere appellations for plants." 



For one instance out of many which might be selected to 

 illustrate a similarity between ancient and modern conceptions 

 of genera, take the familiar name Nyniphwa and its various 

 applications. Dioscorides had two kinds, or species, in his 



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Nymphciia; one was our CaslaUa alha^ the other our 

 Nymphcea lutecu The Tournefortian genus of the same name 

 is just the same thing, though embracing four species inclusive 

 of the two knoAvn to the ancients ; while the Nywpliaa of 

 Linnaeus is more complex than that of the other two, for it 

 includes Nelumbo, a type so diverse from the others that 

 neither Tournefort nor Dioscorides ever named it as a kind 

 of Xymphcea, Both allowed it to stand apart under a (generic) 

 name of its own. So the worst misuse to which the name in 

 question was ever subjected, as a vague appellation for hetero- 

 geneous plants, was that which it received at the hands of 

 Lin 

 Without doubt the ancients sometimes brought together 



nseus. 



under one generic name more incongruities than are embraced 

 in the most complex of Linnjean genera. It is incontestable 

 that for some centuries past we have been making progress 

 in the art, still very imperfect, of detecting the real affinities 

 of plants ; and so we have been all the while approaching 

 the true idea of a genus ; nevertheless, there is not in my 

 opinion any such difference in kind between the genera of 

 ancient and those of modern authors as can affect the justice, 

 the literary propriety, or the historic accuracy of citing the 

 ancients as authors of gerjera wherever their plants— their 

 generic types— are identifiable by their writings. A hundred 

 years airo a celebrated English botanical scholar allowed that 



