6 The Pennsylvania-German Sodety. 



in this category Mulilenberg lias at least 100 species 

 to speak for him ; and third, when embodied in a 

 genus, as was done, when Professor Schreber created 

 the genus Muhlenbergia, to include a large group of 

 beautiful grasses, seven of which flourish all around 

 us in our fields and meadows, and the remainder in 

 the Rocky Mountains, California and Mexico. 



Sometimes such generic names are made to honor 

 persons famous in other ways, wholly apart from any 

 service done in the development of botanical science. 

 Thus, Queen Victoria of England, is forever asso- 

 ciated with a magnificent water-lily, or lotus, of South 

 America, which has a permanent place in all large 

 conservatories and bears her full name Victoria 

 Regina. A stately tree of Japan, with large leaves 

 and blue flowers, allied to our catalpa, and widely 

 cultivated, commemorates a Russian princess, as 

 Paulownia imperialis. Gay Lussac, the French 

 chemist, has his tribute of honor in the Gaylussacias, 

 and Thomas Jefferson, a friend and patron of the 

 natural sciences, in his Jeffersonia diphylla. But 

 the most remarkable example of the kind is found in 

 the gigantic red-wood of the Sierra Nevada of Cali- 

 fornia the celebrated Sequoia gig an tea, which has a 

 sister species, (S. sempervirens) along the Coast Range 

 of the same state. The English botanists, in order 

 to honor the hero of Waterloo, tried to have Welling- 

 tonia adopted instead of Sequoia, but the latter had 

 the precedence, and hence in all time to come the 

 tree will bear the name of Se-quoi-yah, the Cherokee 

 Indian, who invented a syllabic alphabet for the use 



