USAGE OF AMELLUS 129 
Use of the Name Amellus—The entire appearance of the name 
Amellus in literature seems due to its single occurrence in Vergil. 
Columella, the other Latin author who mentions the plant, may 
have obtained his knowledge of it only from this source ; and so, of 
course, may Servius and the other Latin commentators. The word 
occurs also, in quoting the line, in Julius Rufinianus, and in Aru- 
sianus, about 450 A.D. Of its Italian form ame//o, mention has 
been already made, p. 61. It has appeared in four principal ways, 
also in modern botany ; Linnaeus adopting it as the species-name, 
Aster Amellus, 1753; and bestowing it also as a generic name on 
a race of Cape of Good Hope plants close to the true Asters, but 
with a chaffy receptacle. Adanson substituted Amellus for Aster 
as a generic name in its entirety ; except that he separated Aster 
Tripolium L., and retained the name Aster for that ; a mesallance 
by which he attached the name Aster to that particular species 
which the ancients did not consider to be an Aster, and struck it 
off from the one plant for which they did use the name. Colonna 
had preceded him in using Amellus as a genus-name for Aster, 
1592-1616, calling our Aster Amellus by the name Amellus pra- 
fensis, and referring to Tripolium as Amedl/us palustris. Calzolaris 
in his account of the plants of Monte Baldo, near Verona (Venice, 
1566), in calling our Aster Amellus by the name Amellus Virgili, 
may or may not have intended the phrase as a binomial in place of 
Aster. . 
Variants for Amellus are Amello, its current Italian form ; 
Amillo, in the Palatine codex of the Georgics ; Amella, in Servius’ 
commentary. Wedel in 1686 claimed that we do not know 
the gender of Vergil’s noun, and that the nominative was more 
probably Amel/um, Vergil mentioning it only in the dative, 
Amello, 
A Folk-name.—Amellus seems to have been only in pastoral 
use ; not at Rome, where it did not grow ; not in literary or nat- 
uralist’s Latin, which used the word Aster ; not in the Latin of the 
Roman physicians, which used the terms /erba inguinalis and in- 
Suinaria. If Vergil’s ‘cui nomen amello fecere agricolae”’ is to 
be taken literally, the word was the colloquial name in Cisalpine 
Gaul ; and so Martyn and Wedel considered it, Martyn remarking 
“the poet tells us Amellus is a rustick name.” 
