SECTION II: G. HERBACEUM 161 



made a grave mistake when he combined what, for convenience, 

 I have called the Levantine plant of the early authors, with the 

 Brazilian and Jamaican plants subsequently mentioned or described, 

 and even figured, by Marcgraf, Hernandez, Zanoni, Miller, and 

 others. 



Somewhere about the closing decades of the sixteenth century, Chain 

 European writers became acquainted with a ' chain ' or ' kidney ' co on ' 

 cotton. It seems, accordingly, to have been supposed that that 

 condition of the seeds was true of all cottons. Lobel (in 1576), for 

 example, thought he improved on the pictures given by Fuchsius 

 and Matthiolus, some thirty years previously, by furnishing a plate 

 of G. herbaceum to which he added a kidneyed mass of seven seeds. 

 But neither he nor any other subsequent writer definitely described 

 the Levant plant as having kidneyed seeds, though Parkinson (1640), 

 who, perhaps, had no personal knowledge of the subject, remarked 

 that the seeds are ' in a lump or bunch ; ' while Vesling (Ed. Prosper 

 Alpinus, 1640), in discussing the cotton found by him near the 

 aqueduct of Cairo, expressly says the seeds are not crowded together 

 but scattered through the wool. 



It is perhaps somewhat curious that Forskal, who gave the plant Arabian 

 we now call G. arboreum, Linn., the name G. rubrum, should have tion!" 

 given G. herbaceum, Linn., the name of G. arboreum. His speci- 

 mens (named in his own handwriting) are in the British Museum, so 

 that there can be no doubt that the reduction of his plants should 

 be as indicated. The interesting point, however, remains that in 

 Arabia, in 1773, he collected a specimen of G. herbaceum, Linn. 



To the unfortunate amalgamation of the plants of the Levant and 

 America, made by Linnaeus in his ' Hortus Cliffortianus ' and later 

 on in the ' Hortus Upsaliensis,' is due the citation of America as the 

 habitat of G. herbaceum. Since the two plants are absolutely 

 distinct (and perhaps the best known representatives of the groups of 

 cultivated cottons spoken of as the ' Asiatic ' and the ' American '), it 

 is imperative that they should be separated. It becomes, therefore, 

 necessary either to reject the name G. herbaceum or to restrict its 

 signification to one or other of the plants indicated. G. herbaceum 

 denotes a cultivated plant ; was the name given by J. Bauhin, when 

 he urged that there were three, not one, species of Gossypium ; is the 

 name almost universally accepted by modern botanists for the 

 Levantine plant ; and moreover, since there are excellent examples 

 of it in the Linnean and Cliffordian Herbaria (named by Linnaeus 



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