2102 NAMES NOMENCLATURE 



NAMES NOMENCLATURE 



blackberry, for inermis means "without thorns.'' In 

 the great herbarium at the Botanical Garden, Willde- 

 now's plants are preserved in stout blue paper wrap- 

 pers (Fig. 2434). His Rubus inermis is amongst them 

 (Fig. 2435), but it turns out to be a blackberry of 

 Greece. In the old garden at Berlin, early in the cen- 

 tury, American and European plants were growing, each 

 species occupying a little space of earth and marked by 

 a stake label. In time, one of the American plants 



2434. Bundles from the herbarium of Willdenow. 



probably had perished and a Grecian plant occupied its 

 place, growing behind an American stake. Specimens of 

 the plant were taken for the herbarium, and not recog- 

 nizing it as an American plant, Willdenow described it 

 as a new species; but before his time this Grecian plant 

 had been described as Rubus ulmifolius the "elm- 

 leaved rubus" and Willdenow's name, supposedly 

 applied to an American plant, now becomes a synonym 

 of a European species. 



Willdenow's name having failed us, we next take up 

 Link's Rubus argutus (Fig. 2436), and here is still 

 another difficulty; it is an American plant, but of a 

 distinct species from the high-bush blackberry. Other 

 names, not mentioned in this account, must be con- 

 sidered, Trattinnick's, with specimens in Vienna, 

 Michaux's in Paris, Bigelow's of Boston, and others. 

 All were looked up, and none of them could be applied 

 to the common blackberry, and the plant was given a 

 new name, Rubus nigrobaccus. 



It must not be supposed, however, that the case 

 was now disposed of and settled. Every subsequent 

 student has the liberty of his own interpretation. 

 Some botanists consider the common Rubus nigro- 

 baccus to be but a form of R. allegheniensis of Porter, 

 a name which dates from 1896 whereas R. nigrobaccus 

 dates from 1898; in this case, R. allegheniensis holds 

 and R. nigrobaccus becomes a synonym. So all the 

 other forms may be separately judged, and every 

 author has the right to his own judgment and to the use 

 of the name that goes with it. Other interpretations 

 have been made more recently as to the species-lines in 

 Rubus. In a group so difficult and variable as Rubus, 

 the judgments naturally will be diverse and agreement 

 is not to be expected, perhaps not even to be desired. 



(See name lists, end Vol. VI.) L. H. B. 



Historical development of botanical nomenclature. 



The present universally accepted binomial nomen- 

 clature started in 1753 with the publication of Lin- 

 naeus' "Species Plantarum," when for the first time all 

 known plants were named according to a uniform 

 system based on the principle that for the designation 

 of a plant two names, a generic and a specific, each con- 

 sisting of one word only, should be sufficient. 



Before that time there was no uniformity in naming 

 plants; most of them were designated by longer or 

 shorter descriptive phrases, as Aralia caule aculeato, 

 Narcissus niveus odoratus circulo rubello, Mespilus 

 apiifolio virginiana spinis horrida fructu amplo coccineo, 

 Acer foliis palmato-angulatis floribus subapetalis ses- 



silibus fructu pedunculato coryrnboso; others by a 

 single Latin or vernacular name, some by common 

 nouns like Centrum galli, Corona imperialis, Capillus 

 Veneris; not unfrequently the descriptive phrase was 

 reduced to one word, as in Iris germanica, Nymphsea 

 lutea, Berberis vulgaris, combinations which were 

 already in use in the sixteenth century. This more or 

 less lawless naming is usually referred to as pre-Lin- 

 na?an nomenclature. Its beginnings may be traced back 

 more than 2,000 years to the writings of Theo- 

 phrastus (371-286 B. C.), a disciple of Aristotle, to 

 the works of Pliny (33-79 A. D.), and of Diosco- 

 rides, who lived at nearly the same time, and to 

 other ancient writers. Later writers on natural 

 history and medicine up to the fifteenth century 

 added little to the knowledge of the plant world; 

 their writings consisted chiefly of commentaries 

 to the classical works and of scholastic discus- 

 sions on the meaning and application of the 

 names used by the ancient writers and on the 

 medical virtues of the plants as set forth by 

 them. A new era started in the beginning of 

 the sixteenth century when men like Brunfels, 

 whose "Herbarum Vivse Eicones" appeared in 

 1530, Bock, Fuchs and Cordus, began to study 

 the native plants and found that many of them were 

 unknown to the old writers; they published figures 

 drawn from nature and descriptions of these new 

 plants and gave new names to them. The coining of 

 botanical names derived from personal names was 

 inaugurated at that time, and Conrad Gesner (1516- 

 1563) was probably the first one to name plants in 

 compliment to his friends, e. g., Cortusa, Aretia, Vollata 

 and others. A fairly complete enumeration of the plant 

 names with their synonyms known up to 1623 was 

 published in that year by Caspar Bauhin in his "Pinax 

 Theatri Botanici;" this work shows the extent of the 

 botanical knowledge at that time and is valuable as a 

 key to the nomenclature of the older writers. 



Progress in nomenclature is hardly possible without 

 classification. In the earlier works the plants were 

 either enumerated alphabetically or roughly divided 

 into trees, shrubs and herbs or arranged according to 

 their uses. One of the first attempts toward classifica- 

 tion was made by Cesalpini in his "De Plantis Libri 

 XVI" (1583), who arranged the plants roughly accord- 

 ing to their fruits. Other more natural systems and at 

 the same time a clearer conception of genera and species 

 were introduced by Jung, Morison, Ray and Rivinus. 

 Morison was the first botanist to publish a mono- 

 graphic treatment of a natural group in his "Plantarum 

 Umbelliferarum Distributio Nova" (1672). Ray in 

 his "Methodus Plantarum Nova" (1682) distinguished 

 families like Labiatse, Papilionacese, Siliquosse (Cru- 

 ciferae), Grasses, Monopetalse, while Rivinus based his 

 classification chiefly on the corolla and distinguished 

 Monopetalse with regular and with irregular flowers 

 and Pentapetalae and Tetrapetalse with the same sub- 

 divisions. The older writers had often united under 

 one generic name very different plants: e. g., Clematis 

 sylvatica latifolia (=Clematis Vitalba), C. daphnoides 

 (=Vinca minor), Clematis tetraphytta (=Bignonia 

 capreolata), C. indica (=Passiflora)] and as another 

 example, Viola Martia purpurea ( = F. odorata), V. 

 matronalis (=Hesperis matronalis), V. lunaria (=Lun- 

 aria rediviva). The botanists named above, in conse- 

 quence of their better understanding of natural affini- 

 ties, proved the unnatural character of such genera and 

 divided them into different genera under distinct names. 

 In 1700, Tournefort published in his " Institutions 

 Rei Herbaria}" a complete enumeration of all the known 

 genera with descriptions and illustrations; he is con- 

 sidered the founder of the modern conception of the 

 genus and of its nomenclature, and therefore the 

 year 1700 has been proposed by some botanists as the 

 starting-point for generic nomenclature. Tournefort, 



