MIDLAND NATURALIST. 77 
modern popular magazines. It may also be questioned whether in 
exact knowledge regarding ‘‘spineless cacti’’ we have advanced 
much farther that our ancestors of several hundred years ago. 
It has happened many a time in the history of science that we 
discover or rather rediscover something that was known centuries 
ago, and in our happy ignorance of the past we give it out to the 
world as ''brand new," while the world for a time blissfully 
accepts it as such. In things botanical particularly there may arise 
the belief that nothing worth while was known before the middle of 
the 18th century. Botanical congresses have over and over again 
legislated that no plant names used anterior to 1753 are valid. Not 
only ordinary botanists, that take their information second and 
third hand, but also those that pretend to rank in the first class, 
may be tempted to think accordingly that little or no scientific 
observation was made before the so-called ‘‘starting point’’ in 
nomenclature. Many there are too that still believe that Linnaeus 
was the sole author of the binomial nomenclature. Nor did 
Linnaeus even in the Species Plantarum use binary names solely 
as may be seen by looking into that work. Names of three words 
will be found even there in considerable number,—such as Alisma . 
Plantago-aquatica. Binomial nomenclature is about as old as any 
nomenclature as it is the only reasonable one, and such names will 
be found by the hundred in such pre-Linnaean authors as Matthioli, 
John and Caspar Bauhin, Dodonaeus, and many others. 
In regard to ''spineless cacti" we find that they were known 
and recorded about as early as there is any mention of cacti what- 
ever. If the spineless forms, the discovery of which we claim in 
glowing accounts, are not permanent, they are all nothing more or 
less than teratological conditions known and modestly recorded by 
the older herbalists several hundred years ago. 'The older botanists 
knew the plant by the name we still use, Opuntia, and also by 
several others such as Ficus Indica, the Indian Fig, Tune or Tunas 
and a number of other less commonly used names. We shall here 
append some quotations from such of the pre-Linnaean botanists 
easily available to us, though there may be others that may have 
referred to spineless forms of Opuntia. In order to establish be- 
yond doubt that the plant referred to by the older herbalists is 
really the one we now hear so much of, we shall append at some 
length the description of John Parkinson, more for the sake of 
