908 
lectual equipment of every college gradu- 
ate; not as entitling him to the name of 
classical scholar, but as enabling him to 
comprehend his mother tongue and use it 
to better advantage, and as facilitating the 
acquisition of scientific terminology.* That 
minimum should certainly not be less than 
what, at my suggestion, has long been 
required for admission to the two years’ 
course preparatory to the study of medi- 
cine at Cornell University, viz., the equiva- 
lent of four books of Czesar’s ‘ Gallic War’ 
and of Goodell’s ‘The Greek in English.’ 
Burt G. WILDER. 
THE NATIVE DAHLIAS OF MEXICO. 
THE Dahlia, botanically speaking, is 
purely an American genus confined to 
Mexico. When the Spaniards first visited 
Mexico they found a people who had ad- 
vanced considerably out of the state of bar- 
barism. Not only did these people have 
well-governed towns, but they were agri- 
culturists and horticulturists. They culti- 
vated fruits and vegetables, and in their 
gardens were many handsome flowers 
transplanted from the native soil. The 
Dahlia seems to have been one of these 
plants. So struck was he by the beauty of 
this flower that Hernandez, who visited 
Mexico in 1615, in his History of Mexico, 
published in 1651, makes mention of two 
Species, one with pale red flowers which 
grew in the mountains of Quanhuahuac, and 
was called by the natives acoctli. A little 
over a century later, M. Thierry Menon- 
ville, a well-known French botanist of his 
time, was sent to Mexico by his govern- 
ment to steal the cochineal insect from the 
Spaniards. While on his dangerous mis- 
sion Menonville saw the Dahlia on several 
* Linguistic errors may not vitiate anatomic knowl- 
edge, but such inaccuracies as plexi as a plural of 
plexus, and pontic, pontine or pontal as the adjective 
from pons, tend to arouse in classical scholars a gen- 
eral distrust of their perpetrators. 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Vou. VI. No. 155. 
oceasions, and on his return to France, in 
1787, published a book of his adventures, 
in which he spoke of the beauty of the 
strange flower which he had seen. 
About 1788 some seeds of the Dahlia 
must have been sent to Madrid, for it is re- 
corded that plants flowered for the first time 
in the botanic gardens of that city in Octo- 
ber, 1789. A few of these seeds were se- 
cured by Lord Bute and sent to England, 
where they flowered in 1790. The plants, 
however, were soon lost, owing to the mis- 
taken idea that they required stove treat- 
ment. About this time this species received 
the name of Dahlia coccinea, the generic 
name being given by Cavanilles, a Spanish 
priest and one of the most eminent bota- 
nists of his day, who was at that time the 
head of the Royal Gardens at Madrid. The 
genus was named in 1791 in the Icones Plan- 
tarum by Cavanilles in honor of Andreas 
Dahl, a Swede, a student and disciple of 
the great botanist Linnzus. Later, Carl 
Wildenow, objecting to the name Dahlia, 
on account of its similarity to Dalea, re- 
named the plant Georgina after Georgi, a 
Russian scientist and traveller. According 
to Salisbury, a second species, Dahlia varia- 
bilis, was introduced into England in 1804 
by Lady Holland, who sent the seeds from 
Madrid. Its behavior under cultivation is 
described by Salisbury in his paper read 
before the Horticultural Society in 1808 
and printed in the first volume of the Trans- 
actions. 
The most successful early cultivator of the 
Dahlia appears to have been Count Lilieur 
atSt.Cloud. He had four distinct varieties 
to work on in 1808. The experiments of 
the florists began in 1813, and a writer ina 
horticultural magazine of 1818 says that 
with each new year came new varieties until 
the kinds seemed almost like new creations, 
so different were they in color and form. 
Count Lilieur several years before had 
purples, dark reds, cherry-reds, buffs and 
