10 STUDIES IN THE GENUS ASTER 
that of hosts of other plants, the turning-point was also nearly 
coincident in time, having just been reached in 1576 in the work 
of Clusius,—who had begun his botanical studies in 1550 and was 
searching for plants in the Alps as early as 1553 but who ripened 
his species well before publishing. 
For the period before Clusius, Meyer’s unfinished Geschichte 
der Botanik * is the well-known and masterly summary, and we can 
but regret that the life of the untiring author was cut off in the 
midst of his noble undertaking. Wherever possible I have used 
the authors themselves, seeking to make them tell their own story, 
using for this purpose besides my own library, that of Columbia 
University and of the N. Y. Botanical Garden, with aids from that 
of Prof. E. L. Greene, from the Astor library, etc. Next to the 
authors themselves I owe most to Meyer; and so far as they still 
remain serviceable, I have made use of Sprengel’s Historia rei her- 
bariae (Amsterdam, 1807-8), Winckler’s Geschichte der Botanik 
(Frankfort, 1854), Lenz's Botanik in alten Griechen und R6men 
(Gotha, 1859), Billerbeck’s Flora Classica (Leipsic, 1824), and a 
multitude of other works of more restricted field. 
Aster as a plant name has long been in botanical use, its contin- 
uous history extending through more than 2,200 years. Its appli- 
cation, especially its limitation, has been more or less indefinite, 
but seems always to have included one pivotal species, the Aster 
Amellus of Linnaeus, the Aster Atticus of Dioscorides and of 
antiquity, the historic type of the genus, and a fairly early ex- 
ample, we may say, of a binomial plant name. This species pre- 
sents the generic characters fairly well, but owes its early preémi- 
nence particularly to the fact that nature had produced it in 
abundance near that center of ancient culture, the city of Athens. 
Identification of classical references depends largely on con- 
tinuity of citation. Citation makes the Asteriscus of the Greeks a 
synonym of their Aster Atticus. It is in the form Asteriscus that 
the Aster makes its earliest appearance in written botany ; disre- 
garding for the present its still earlier probable appearance in med- 
icine, as mentioned by Hippocrates in the previous century under 
the different name polyophthalmon. These are the earliest occur- 
*In 4 Vols., KGnigsberg, 1854-1857, by Ernst H. F. Meyer. 
