GERANIUM MACULATUM. 
SPOTTED CRANE'S-BILL. 
NATURAL ORDER, GERANIACEAE. 
GERANIUM MACULATUM, Linnzeus.—Stem erect, dichotomous above; leaves three to five parted ; 
petals entire, twice as long as the ca'yx. Stem twelve to eighteen inches high, hairy. 
Leaves two to three inches long, marked with pale blotches, radical leaves on petioles 
three to six or eight inches in Jength; stem leaves on shorter petioles, the uppermost subses- 
sile. Flowers purple, large, subcorymbose. (Darlington’s /lorg Cestrica. Sve also 
Gray’s Flora of the Northern United States, Chapman’s Flora of the Southern United 
States, and Wood’s Class-Book of Botany.) 
Pa NesO “general view of the flora of the United States” would 
aM) be perfect without one of the Geraniacee, so we give 
his now as the prettiest American representative of this very 
interesting family of plants. We have not many in America to 
choose from, for the genus Geranium belongs chiefly to the 
eastern hemisphere, where they number a hundred species, while 
there are only about half a dozen within all the wide boundaries 
of the United States. Some of the species of the old world were 
well known to the early Greeks. The name Geranium, though 
adopted from Pliny, the ancient Latin author, is really the Greek 
Geranion. Geranos is the Greek word for crane, a well-known, 
long necked bird; and as there is some resemblance in the half 
mature seed-vessels which in some of the species curve down- 
wards from the summit of their slender stems, it is thought prob- 
able that the name was given to the plant by the Greeks from 
this resemblance; and from the name as associated with these 
drooping fruited kinds we have the common name of “crane’s- 
bill.” Many of the names of plants in use by the ancients have 
been applied by modern botanists to genera having only a distant 
. (453) 
