INTRODUCTION. Ixiii 



There is physical and there is literary 

 Identification. Linnaeus gave us the former, 

 but not the latter. Linnaeus gave botan- 

 ists the power of identifying plants with 

 the names which he had assigned to them ; 

 but, then, his names were only selections 

 out of that old forest of names that had 

 confused the study. Linnaeus did not give 

 us the power of saying what previous 

 authors may have meant by each par- 

 ticular name they used. This is a different 

 sort of Identification, it is of a literary and 

 historical kind, and it is with this that our 

 present enquiry is concerned. 



The whole study of identifying the plants 

 of the ancients has become a very proverb 

 for uncertainty. After all the efforts of 

 the Commentators from Hermolaus to Mat- 

 thiolus and from Matthiolus to G. Bauhin, 

 the problem is far from being solved. 

 Sprengel went over the ground again, but 

 his identifications are not held to be final. 

 Sibthorp's splendid work, the Flora Grceca, 

 long regarded as a standard for the cer- 

 tainty of its identifications, was at length 

 criticised by Fraas in his Synopsis Florae 



