l88 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL 54 



needed. There was not the shadow of a reason for appending a 

 second name; and he, no more than hundreds of botanical writers 

 before his day, ever thought of such a thing. Sometimes when there 

 are one or more notable modifications of a type — varieties or species 

 of it — the original goes by the generic name only, while the others 

 have each its own cognomen. Of this sort is his nomenclature of 

 three buttercups which he figures and gives account of.' In the 

 nomenclature of to-day they are (i) Ranunculus acris, (2) its double- 

 flowered garden variety, and (3) Ranunculus bulbosus. The 

 generic name which Brunfels adopts is Pes corvinus, i.e., Crowfoot, 

 turned into Latin. With him the first species is simply Crowfoot, 

 its variety of the gardens is Full-flowered Crowfoot, the third plant 

 is Lesser Crowfoot. 



This early practice of leaving the one original representative of 

 a genus without any cognomen, even after said genus has ceased 

 to be monotypic, is a practice doubly suggestive in relation to the 

 philosophy of nomenclature ; for, in the first place it plainly reveals 

 the antiquity of the idea of generic types, and emphasizes it. In 

 the second place, the failing to assign a cognomen to the type species 

 entails a difficulty; becomes a possible source of ambiguity and 

 perplexity; for, Pes corvinus being mentioned, the question may 

 chance to be asked: Which one of the three? That question 

 is virtually a demand, and a most reasonable one, that the type 

 species have also its particular cognomen. That botanists of 

 fifteen centuries anterior to Brunfels had seen this to be desirable, 

 one may infer from the nomenclature of Plantago. Two species of 

 this genus were known to Pliny; and he had a specific cognomen 

 for the type species as well as for the other. They were Plantago 

 major and Plantago minor; and Brunfels follows Pliny in this. 

 His type species is not simply Plantago; it is P. major, which name, 

 as well as P. minor, the German father duly credits to the Latin 

 author of the olden time . He uses , then , a specific name for the orig- 

 inal representative of a genus when there is classic authority for 

 so doing; but I have not observed him taking the initiative in this 

 course by actually himself assigning to the type species of any 

 genus a cognomen. 



These paragraphs on Brunfels as nomenclator ought not to be 

 concluded without our having taken a briefly comprehensive survey 

 of his principles. These principles, such as he was more or less 

 ruled by, will be all the more suggestive to us from the very fact 

 that he did not professedly have any; for doubtless he had never 

 ' Herb. Viv. Icon., vol. i, pp. 143-150. 



