OUR AMPHIBIOUS PERSICARIAS 9 
as would be done in our own time with all our modern advantages. 
It will seem the more marvellous when we consider it to have been 
worked out correctly about two centuries and a quarter ago. It 
looks too as if Massart had not added, from an ecological point of 
view, very much to the work of Ray except perhaps the finding of 
‘the xerophytic phase of the plant. It is being found gradually 
that not a few of the discoveries attributed to modern scientists 
are modestly recorded in the older herbals and writings of the 
botanists of hundreds of years ago. With the fashion growing 
that 1753 is the beginning of taxonomy it is also not infrequently 
come to be believed by some that plant physiology, ecology and 
anatomy go back no further. 
The remarks of Ray need no comment of mine to make them 
more emphatic, except that had the present day student known 
as much of the ecology of P. amphibia, we might have been 
spared much misunderstanding about the plant. It is a sad 
commentary on modern ecology that we must yet learn over again 
the discoveries of centuries ago and admit that in forgetting, or 
not thinking it worth while to study old dusty tomes, we have to 
learn again by the hard method of renewed experience what we 
could find out in a few minutes consultation of the much derided 
herbalists of old. 
Ray’s statement that the smooth, floating aquatic plant 
known to the ancients and older writers as Potamogiton,* is 
positively the same as and identical with the plant called, up to 
his time, Persicaria salicis folio, the terrestrial, is worthy of note. 
He no longer sees the need of the former name and reduces it to 
synonymy. He says that botanists of his time had taken them for 
separate species, and warns future investigators not to do the same, 
noting that some had thought the hairy plant (his Persicaria salicis 
folio,) as a distinct species from the water plant, (Potamogeton 
angustifolia.) He admits that he himself had in error formerly 
thought these plants as different species though not ashamed as 
he is now to confess it, intimating too thereby how easy he might 
* There is no doubt at present that Potamogeton of Dioscorides, Pliny 
of the ancients and of the herbalists of the 15th and 16th centuries is no 
other plant than P. amphibia. See E. L. Greene. Leaflets, Vol. 1. p. 24, 
Bubani. P., Flora Pyrenaea Vol IV. p. 10. See also Dodonaeus, R. Pempt. 
p. 572. (1583) also Kruyd Boeck. (1644) p. 623. .Lobelius, M. Observ. 
p. 164. (1576.) Chabraeus D. Stirp. Sciag. p. 563 (1677). See also Morison 
Dalechamps, Tabernaemontanus. etc, etc. 
