LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 243 



labiate dead nettles, Tragus has order where in Brunfelsius there 

 was confusion^ ; for the figures of the two nettles have Urtica printed 

 over them, while the two dead nettles are respectively indicated as 

 Galeopsis and Lamium. To these succeeds Marrubium with an 

 array of four species. Only one of them is of that genus ; two belong 

 to a genus that had not at the time been proposed, that is, Stachys; 

 the fourth is a plant that was destined to stand as prototype of 

 the genus Lycopus. The figure well represents Lycopus EuropcBus; 

 and this appears to be the first publication of the species, though 

 he writes as if it were already familiarly known in the pharmacy of 

 the time under the name Marrubium palustre.^ It is in the course of 

 his definition of this too amplified Marrubium that he describes the 

 fruiting calyx with its four naked nutlets; one of the most im- 

 portant characteristics of the whole family of the labiates; though 

 as we have said before he is far enough from realizing the taxonomic 

 value of what he has thus been the first to discover and describe.^ 

 The presence of this pouch, as he calls it, with its four naked seeds 

 occurring as it does in some herbs with dissected foliage, does not 

 induce him to place any such in the same line with the nettle- 

 leaved labiates. His mind upon these matters is the mind of all 

 antiquity, and of his contemporaries, dominated by the idea that 

 likeness as to foliage and stem and root, together with agreement 

 in sensible qualities, more surely indicate consanguinity than do 

 similarity in respect to seed vessels and seeds. We shall meet 

 with plenty of proofs of this. 



Next after Marrubium the first considerable genus is Mentha. 

 Tragus is aware that it is difficult, and says that quite a number of 

 plants which some have regarded as mints others have referred to 

 other genera. He seems to have a new view of his own, namely, 

 that no plant is properly a Mentha that has not an upright mode of 

 growth, with flowers separate from the leafy part, and borne in 

 naked pedunculate spikes at summit of the stem. It is a group of 

 mints that is sufiiciently natural, and has been recognized as such 

 by all special students of the genus of later periods. Tragus, as his 

 four plates show, hmits the genus to this group, disposing some- 

 what variously of the equally numerous species that have all their 

 flowers in the axils of the leaves. As good a species of Mentha 

 as that called Pulegium is excluded, and held as a monotypic 

 genus, doubtless partly on account of its peculiar odor and its 



•■ Page 179 preceding. 

 2 Stirp. Cotnm., p. 10. 

 > Ibid., p. 8. 



