NAMES FOR ASTER ATTICUS , 67 
application of the system ; those of the ancient Greeks being used 
only in the cases where they desired to distinguish two or more 
plants felt by them to be closely related. 
Why then did the Greeks use the binomial for Aster Atticus ? 
The first to use the binomial was the physician, Dioscorides ; the 
poets did not use it. Doubtless it was used to distinguish it in 
medicine from the other great Aster of medical use, Aster Samius 
the white earth of Samos, and to distinguish it from the numerous 
medical preparations called Aster, for which see infra. 
ASTERION, 7. @., little Aster, little star, dorépcov, the same as 
Aster Atticus, D. (interpolation >), Apuleius Platonicus, Simon 
Januensis, Ortus. ‘1 have not heard derépcoy for a flower in mod- 
ern Greek,” A/ftica. 
Asterion occurs in Dioscorides for two other plants ; for 
Canna sativa, and for Spondylium. 
Asterion, from their star-like spots, was also given by the 
Greeks as name of a kind of spider or Phalangium, Wicander, 
Ther, 725, and to a lizard. 
ASTERION.—éoteptoy ; Pausanias, bk. 2, c. 17 ; the same word 
as the last, assimilated to the pronunciation of the river dateprwy ? 
by which he found it growing (but deemed by Bock, 1536, to be 
so different a plant as Marrubium). 
Asteriscus, little aster or little star, datspeaxoc, Theophrastus, 
4, 13; D. (interpolation ?) 4, 118 ; occurs also Apuleius Platonicus, 
c. 60 (fide Stephanus’ Thesaurus) ; also listed as “ "Aateptaxog xaz 
datéptov 0 dathp actos, Astericum,”’ in Lexicon MS. ex Cod. 
Reg., 1843 (Paris ; fide Stephanus) ; spelled Asteriscon by Gerard, 
1597. 
Modern botany uses Asteriscus as the name of a composite 
genus* (separated in part from Buphthalmon L.), so named by 
transfer from a variable use in the 16th and 17th centuries for 
many small-flowered plants, which were by others classed in Aster ; 
Cornut, 1635, publishing Aster cordifolius L. as an Aséeriscus. 
Modern Greek does not retain Asteriscus as a flower-name 
(fide dictionaries ; nor in popular unwritten use, Attica) but retains 
it in the use (ancient Greek, English, etc.) of asterisk, and as the 
* Of which A. aquaticus (L.) Moench was found in Greece by Sibthorp. 
