MIDLAND NATURALIST. 57 
trained botanist may identify to a certainty the genus and species ; 
and then its Latin name—its universally received scientific name— 
is given; all this quite as in the most dry and exclusively technical 
of books. Just this dry diagnosis, however, is one of the prime 
necessities of a good book of botany ; that is, of botany that is not 
meant for the unbotanical, but for botanists. Let not this be over- 
looked. But still, it is not needful that a booklet about plants 
should both begin and end with mere plant description; and Mr. 
Tidestrom most happily demonstrates this; and it is in the demon- 
stration of it that the ELYSIUM excels—and very far excels—all 
ordinary and familiar books in which plants are described. 
For an example, let us review the Elysium's presentation of 
$ 
Adiantum pedatum, one of the most admired of North American : 
ferns, as well as one of the most familiar among them; a plant 
commonly known to the unbotanical among us as the Maidenhair 
ern. 
The topic is introduced by the Graeco-Latin or scientific plant- 
name ADIANTUM ; and this quite as one finds it in any and every 
book of systematic botany. It is the name of the genus—that is, 
of the whole assemblage of the so-called maidenhair ferns. Now 
printed on the same line with this name ADIANTUM in almost all 
books of scientific botany one reads an L. or the abbreviation Linn., 
which is always understood to signify that Linnaeus, the most 
noted botanist of the eighteenth century, founded this genus 
ADIANTUM and gave it that name. Our author declines to write 
either L. or Linn. after this generic name, but puts there the 
abbreviation Theophr. instead. And only to the uninstructed will 
this substitution of Theophr. in place of the conventional Linn., or 
L., seem a small matter. But any real master of botanical science 
at once perceives here the author's claim that not Linnaeus but 
Theophrastus is author of the generic name ADIANTUM. Theo- 
phrastus, the father of scientic botany taught publicly, and wrote 
an immortal treatise on it some 2 50 years before the Christian era. 
In that he has an account of the genus adiantum, and under that 
Selfsame name. The upshot of all this is, that not only is Linnaeus 
not to be credited with adiantum ; the genus was so known and so 
Written upon by all botanists during all of two thousand years be- - 
fore him. To Mr. Tidestrom's mind evidently to credit Linnaeus 
with ADIANTUM is to intercalate a children's fable into the midst 
Of a page of science, and that not as a fable, but as if it were the 
truth. "The scientific mind—the mind thatis in love with science— 
isin love with the truth, and naturally demands of science that it shall 
