VI] 



Colonna and Banhin 



139 





of leaf form, since the affinities of plants are indicated not by 

 the leaf, but by the characters of the flower, the receptacle, 

 and, especially, the seed 1 . He brought forward instances 

 to show that previous authors had sometimes placed a plant 

 in the wrong genus, because they only attended to the 

 leaves and ignored the structure of the flower. 



In the writings of Gaspard Bauhin, at the end of the 

 sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, 



KENVFAR 



Text-fig. 65. "Nenufar" = Waterlily [Arnaldus de Villa Nova, 

 Tractatus de virtutibus herbarum, 1499]. 



the binary system of nomenclature is used with a high 

 degree of consistency, each species bearing a generic and 

 specific name, though sometimes a third, or even a fourth, 

 descriptive word is added. These extra words are not, 



1 'Minuscognitarumstirpium...EK<t>PA5!IC.' 1616. Pars altera, Cap. xxvn. 

 p. 62 "tam in hac, quam in aliis plantis, non enim ex foliis, sed ex flore, semi- 

 nisque, conceptaculo, et ipso potius semine, plantarum afrmitatem dijudicamus." 



