•JUV-> N AM ES — NOMENCLATURE 



NAM ES — NOMENCLATURE 



blaokln^rn.', for incrmis means "without tl\orns." In 

 the pn^iit herbivrimn nt tlie Botanical Cianlen, Willile- 

 now's phuits !ire proserveii in stout bhie paper wrap- 

 jH'rs (.Fig. 2-K54). His liubus iiuniii.t is amongst them 

 vFig. 243">), but it turns out to be a blacklu'iry of 

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

 tury, American and lOviropean |)lants were growing, each 

 spooies 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 .Vmerican 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 Ruhus ulmifDliu.'i — the "elm- 

 leaved rubus" — and WiUdenow's name, supposedly 

 applied to an .American i)lant, now becomes a sjTionym 

 of a European species. 



WiUdenow'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 jilant, but of a 

 distinct sjiecies 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 bo svipposed, however, that the case 

 was now disposed of and settled. E\'ery 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 thLs case, R. allegheniensis holds 

 and R. nigrobaccus becomes a synonjTn. 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 mafle 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. \1.) L. H. B. 



Historical development of botanical nomenclature. 



The present universally accepted binomial nomen- 

 clature started in 17.53 with the publication of Lin- 

 naeus' "'Sfx^cics Plantarum," when for the first time all 

 known plants were named according to a imiform 

 system ba.sed 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 wa-s no unifonnity in naming 

 plants; most of them were designated by longer or 

 .-horter descriptive j)hra.ses, as Aralin mule aculealo, 

 SaTciHsus niveus odoralus circuUi rubello, Mespilus 

 apiifolio virginiana spinis homrvla fruclu amplo coccineo, 

 Acer fotiiH palmato-angulalis floribiui subapetalis ses- 



silibus fructu pcdunculaio cort/mboso; others by a 

 single Latin or vernacular name, some by common 

 nouns like Ceiilruin yalii, Coroita iinperinlis, ('apillus 

 Veneris; not vuifrequently the descriptive phnuse was 

 reduced to one word, :us in Iris germiinicii, N i/mphs'a 

 lutea, Herbiris i'id;iaris, combinations whicli were 

 already in u.se in the sixteenth century. This more or 

 less lawless nan\ing is usually referred to as pre-Lin- 

 n;van nomenclature. Its beginnings may be traced back 

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

 phrastus (371-2S6 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 meclicine up to the fifteenth century 

 added little to the knowledge of the plant workl; 

 their writings consisted chiefly of commentaries 

 to the classical works and of scholastic discus- 

 sions on the meaning and apjilication of the 

 names useil 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 "llerbaruni \'iva> Eicones" appeared in 

 1530, Bock, Fuchs and Cordus, began to study 

 the native plants and found that many of them were 

 unknov\Ti to the old writers; they published figures 

 drawn from nature antl 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 (1.516- 

 l.")63) wa-s probably the first one to name plants in 

 comphment to his friends, e. g., Cortusa, Aretia, VoUata 

 and others. A fairly comjilete 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. 



Progre.ss 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" (1.583), who arranged the plants roughly accord- 

 ing to their fruits. Other more natural systems and at 

 the same time a clearer conce])tion of genera and species 

 were introduced by Jung, Morison, Ray and Rivinus. 

 Morison was the first botanist to publi.sh a mono- 

 graphic treatment of a natural group in his "Plantarum 

 UmbelUferanmi Distributio Nova" (1672). Ray in 

 his "Methodus Plantarum Nova" (1682) distinguished 

 families like Labiat*, Papilionaceae, Siliquosa; (Cru- 

 cifera^), Gnusses, Monopefala', while Rivinus based his 

 classification chiefly on the corolla and distinguished 

 Monopetalce with regular and with irregular flowers 

 and PentapetaUe and Tetrapetala^ with the same sub- 

 divisions. The older writers had often united under 

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

 sylvalica lalifolin ( = Clematis Vitalba), C. daphnoides 

 ( = Vinca minor), Clematis tetraphylla ( = Bigy\onia 

 capreolala), C. indica { = Passiflora); and as another 

 example, Viola Martia purpurea ( = V'. odorala), V. 

 matronalis (—Hcsperis matronalis), V. lunaria ( = Lun- 

 aria redinva). 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 dilTerent genera under distinct names. 

 In 1700, Tournefort published in his "Institutiones 

 Rei Herbari;c" a complete enumeration of all the known 

 genera with descriptions and illustrations: he is con- 

 sidered the founder of the modem conception of the 

 genus and of its nomenclature, and therefore the 

 year 1700 has been proposed by some bot.anists as the 

 starting-point for generic nomenclature. Tournefort, 



