116 RAY AND SOME OF HIS FELLOW-WORKERS 



authors, observations on insects which feed upon the 

 plants, and anything else which might prove useful 

 to his pupils. These notes are often curious, and throw 

 light upon the state of natural history in 1660, but 

 the want of arrangement is so troublesome that the 

 reader may be obliged to make an index for himself. 

 Some notable passages will now be extracted in a con- 

 densed form. 



Uncertainty of Nomenclature 

 It is startling to find Ruta, Salvia, Paronychia, 

 Saxifraga and Empetron given as synonyms of Adiantum; 

 or Tussilago and Chrysanthemum as synonyms of Caltha, 

 but parallel cases are to be found in Caspar Bauhin's 

 Pinax. When it was thought legitimate to group 

 plants by the shape of the leaf, or the medicinal virtues 

 (often quite imaginary), the most eccentric associations 

 were possible. 



Both in this Catalogue and in the later Synopsis 

 Stirpium a species is usually an indivisible group of 

 plants, while a genus is a group of species. The ten 

 species of Willow, for example, are arranged in the 

 Catalogue under two genera. This sense of the word 

 genus is not, however, invariable ; genus may mean 

 no more than kind or sort.^ What we call the generic 

 name is with Ray " the name," to which he affixes 

 an adjectival "epithet" characteristic of the species. 

 Different genera do not necessarily bear different 

 " names," either in the Cambridge Catalogue or in 

 the Synopsis. Thus clover and wood-sorrel are both 

 called Trifolium, though they are placed (in the Synopsis) 

 in different parts of the system. Ray quotes from 



I Examples occur in Cat. Cantab, under the heads of Lupulus, Hordeura, 

 Triticum, &o. 



