14 PLANT NAMES 



Thames and landed her precious freight safely in 

 London. 



Linnaeus' work in Botany was twofold. First, 

 his system of classification, based on the number and 

 position of the stamens and pistils, the pollen-bearing 

 and seed-bearing parts of a plant, just as he classified 

 mammals by their teeth and birds by their beaks 

 and feet. It was not a sound system, for it some- 

 times groups plants together which have nothing 

 in common besides this particular set of organs. 

 Thus it happens that in the Linnsean system 

 Valerian, Butcher's Broom, Irises, and Sedges are 

 classed together. But defective as the system was, 

 it was extremely useful until the larger and truer 

 classification expounded by Bentham and Hooker 

 in England, and in a slightly different form by 

 Engler in Germany, superseded it. The other great 

 work of Linnaeus, with which we are concerned here, 

 was in nomenclature. In this department his work 

 was sound, and in essentials remains a law for 

 botanists. He laid down thirty-one canons, most 

 of which hold good to this day. His main idea was 

 to denote each plant by two names, referring to its 

 genus and species, the first being a substantive, the 

 second an adjective, agreeing with the first in 

 gender, or in some cases a substantive used adjec- 

 tivally. Before his time plants used to be iden- 

 tified by long Latin descriptions. Thus the Dog 

 Rose would be Rosa sylvestris vulgaris flore odorato 

 incarnato — that is, " the common Rose of the woods 

 with a sweet-scented, flesh-coloured flower." Lin- 



