34 Botanists of Germany and the Netherlands [Book i. 



genera ; it is only from the name that we know that several 

 species belong to one genus ; we might almost believe that the 

 characters of the genus are intended to be supplied by the 

 strange etymological explanation appended in italics to the 

 generic name. These fanciful etymologies maintained them- 

 selves to the end of the 17 th century, when Tournefort did 

 battle with them ; they were an evil which sprang in a great 

 measure from Aristotelian and scholastic modes of thought, 

 and from the belief that it was possible to conceive of the 

 nature of a thing from the original meaning of its name. 



Nothing shows better the earnestness of Bauhin's research 

 than the fact, that he devoted the labour of forty years to his 

 1 Pinax,' in order to show how each one of the species given by 

 him was named by earlier botanists. The example already 

 given from Fuchs shows how many names a plant had received 

 by the middle of the 16th century; even in Dioscorides and 

 Pliny we find a whole row of names given for a single plant, 

 and the botanists of Fuchs' time used their utmost endeavours 

 to attach the names in Dioscorides and other ancient writers 

 to particular plants found in central Europe. Dioscorides, 

 Theophrastus, and Pliny either add no descriptions to the names 

 of their plants, or they describe them in so unsatisfactory a man- 

 ner, that it was a very difficult task for the science of that day, as 

 it is still for us, to recognise the plants of the ancient writers ; 

 hence arose such a confusion of names that the reader of a 

 botanical work can never be sure whether the plant of one 

 author is the same as that of another with the same name. A 

 description of a plant is therefore usually accompanied in the 

 1 6th century by a critical enquiry how far the name used agrees 

 with that of other authors. Kaspar Bauhin sought to put an 

 end to this condition of uncertainty by his ' Pinax,' in which he 

 showed in the case of all species known to him what were the 

 names given to them by the earlier writers, and he has thus 

 enabled us to see our way through the nomenclature of the 

 period of which we are speaking ; the ' Pinax 'is in a word the 



