127 



The author was Jacob Breyne, whose fine foho of descriptions, 

 with excellent copper-plate engravings, of one hundred new or 

 rare exotics, was publislied at Dantzic, in the year 1678, and 

 now numbers itself among the rich classics of seventeenth-cen- 

 tury botany. Up to that time, as well as even somewhat later, 

 botanical nomenclators were indifferent as to whether a generic 

 name were made up of one word or of two, or even three ; and 

 Breyne, in the present instance, offered to the public a choice be- 

 tween two names for this new type, each of them a generic name 

 of two terms, each alluding to that semblance of a peacock 

 crown presented by the stamens. It might be denominated 

 " Frutcx Pavoiiiims, sive Crista Pavonis'' ; and contemporary 

 botanists adopted the second of the two ; and this latinization of 

 peacock's crest remained the accepted name of this beautiful 

 genus until Tournefort — something of a reformer in nomencla- 

 ture — renamed it Poinciaiia. 



Thus far we seem to have arrived at no more than the origin 

 of the last half of the name Cliaviaccrista ; but the history of 

 the first half may be told more briefly. 



In the selfsame volume in which Crista Pavonis was published 

 as a genus, Breyne proposes a second new genus belonging to 

 this same family ; the type of this a low herb, yet in some of its 

 aspects so much like Crista Pavoiiis that he names this one 

 Chainaccrista Pavonis, the low, or dwarf peacock's crest. This 

 plant so named by Breyne is the historic type of the modern 

 genus CJiaviavcrista. Linnaeus, in 1753, decided that it might 

 be viewed as a species of the genus Cassia, and, dropping the 

 second term, Pa^'oiiis, of Breyne's double-worded generic name, 

 the great reformer assigned the plant the binary name Cassia 

 Chauiaccrista. 



In restoring to its well-merited rank this genus originally pro- 

 posed by Breyne, it was fitting that it should bear the name 

 Chainaccrista rather than Breyne's original and too sesquipedalian 

 CJiamaccristapavonis. We realize our general indebtedness to 

 the Swedish reformer of nomenclature, who knew so well how 

 to abbreviate names that seemed too long ; and we seem likely 

 to need him again, or some other in his place, by and by ; for 



