214 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



composite and a ten-petalled flower of an anemone or a buttercup 

 seem very unlike. By the ancients, and by everybody down to 

 Fuchsius' time and much later they were not regarded as being 

 different . The superficial likeness between the two is great. In 

 either type there is a yellow center made up of little things com- 

 pacted together, and this is encircled by rather many narrow leaves 

 apt to be different in coloring from those of central tuft, or mat, or 

 cone. The different constituency of those yellow centers in anthe- 

 mis and anemone no one had yet perceived, even in Fuchsius' time. 

 "With him, as with all botanical antiquity, the yellow middle part 

 was made up of the "stamina," the " capillamenta, " the "flocci," 

 in anthemis as in anemone: and that the circle of colored leaves is a 

 circle of ray-flowers in anthemis, and of petals or sepals in anemone 

 and buttercup — that is a refinement anthological of which neither 

 Dioscorides in his day, nor Fuchsius fifteen centuries later, had ever 

 dreamed. But in the grain fields of Greece and Italy there grew 

 in abundance one anemoneous herb with perfectly anthemideous 

 habit and foliage, and flower leaves dark-red — easily within the 

 wide range of the purples of the ancients. Must not this have been 

 the Anthemis eranthemon of Dioscorides? Its modem name is 

 Adonis wstivalis} Certainly this, rather than Delphinium Con- 

 solida, is the third anthemis of the Greek physician. And the 

 fault of Fuchsius is his utter disregard of those floral marks in 

 respect to which the Greek had said that all three species of an- 

 themis were at agreement; though as to mere foliage, and the 

 annual root as well as more of growth, the larkspur-anthemis of 

 Fuchsius answers well enough to the other kinds; and this would 

 have been the apology for Fuchsius' erroneous determination of the 

 plant, had he not virtually disclaimed it for himself by attributing 

 it to some unknown earlier botanist whose anonymous manuscript 

 has been at his disposal. In this manuscript he says, " there is an 

 exquisite drawing of this plant, which is commonly called consolida 

 regalis, " and then he proceeds to quote, from this unknown author, 

 the following : " Some call the herb Monachella or else Capuciaria, 

 doubtless in allusion to the hood of the monks, which the flower 

 recalls. Dioscorides calls it Eranthemon, and it is one of the kinds 

 of Anthemis, having the foliage of the chamomile, though of a 

 darker green; but the flower is rather like that of a violet. " ^ 



Evidently the author of that unpublished commentary had been 



> See Matthiolus, Comm. (ed. of 1565), pp. 904-906, with fine plate of 

 Adonis, in between two plates of anthemids. 

 ' Hist. Stir p., p. 28. 



