42 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. S4 



than the lily genus of the modern professionals; though not so 

 widely different from that of the books of botany of some centuries 

 ago. It embraces Lilium, Fritillaria (Checkered Lily), Hemero- 

 callis (Day Lily), Amaryllis (Belladonna Lily), Vallota (Scarlet 

 Lly), and many another genus of liliaceous and amaryllidaceous 

 plants, besides Convallaria and the members of several iridaceous 

 genera. All of these have showy flowers of the same morphological 

 type as that of the true lily. And to this floral type even the 

 ■white funnel-form spathes of certain araceous plants have been 

 associated, as the name Calla Lily plainly betrays; though it is not 

 to be doubted that the entire, narrow, veinless foliage of all these 

 plants has helped in the making of this popular generic synthesis. 

 And then, on the part of the botanists, the analyzing, assorting, 

 and systematically arranging of these diverse elements of the 

 primitive genus lily — the genus as even now, I say, accepted by 

 a great multitude of mere flower lovers — has occupied a great 

 number of taxonomic specialists during later centuries. The care- 

 fully gathered records of the gradual evolution of our present 

 taxonomy of the lily-flowered plants would fill a thick volume; 

 would most perfectly establish the fact that those botanically 

 untaught sometimes classify by the flowers; would illustrate how 

 different generations of professed taxonomists have made their 

 various appeals to different organs, some to the flowers chiefly, 

 others giving much weight to considerations of roots, bulbs, and 

 corms, while others were more influenced by considerations of the 

 pericarp and seed. And such a book, in its completeness, would 

 form an instructive epitome of the whole history of botany. 



It would be as easy to produce instances of a primitive classifying 

 by characters of the root; or, at least, of those subterranean parts of 

 plants which, until within a very recent period, were universally 

 confused as roots. But it may be unnecessary to multiply proofs 

 of the existence of an almost more than fragmentary, and really 

 rather extensive system of what one may paradoxically denominate 

 pre-botanical botany. Enough may have been said already for 

 the accentuating of the opinion that there are beginnings of our 

 science which the historians should not have overlooked. It has 

 been out of those crude beginnings that learning and philosophy have 

 developed what we now call the real systematic botany. They 

 are even the prothallium from which at length there has arisen the 

 frond of whatever strength and symmetry and grace there may 

 be in the now accepted taxonomy of plants. 



This condition of things being once seen and admitted, we shall 



