LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 249 



comprehension of his method than by following him in his further 

 treatment of the cruciferous plants. The list of seven species 

 which, set in line, precede the buttercups, together with the line of 

 five species that succeed the buttercups, amount to about half the 

 number of this family which he figures and describes. The other 

 twelve or fifteen are discussed in two groups, each widely removed 

 from the present series and also from one another. This is because 

 the author must conform to the ancient usage of treating ornamental 

 plants all by themselves in one place, and the edible plants of the 

 kitchen garden also apart from all others. Under these divisions, 

 however, we find the crucifers in each well kept together. The 

 ornamental kinds, to give them by later names, are Cheiranthus, 

 two species of Matthiola, and Hesperis matronalis.'^ The last 

 is a little separated from the line; two other plants, both remote 

 from the crucifers, but popularly called violets, being intruded. I 

 entertain no doubt about Tragus' having perceived the real con- 

 sanguinity subsisting between these wallflower-gilliflower orna- 

 mental plants — all known as violets — and the other crucifers; 

 for in describing the wallflower he remarks that it belongs to the 

 four-leaved — that is, the four-petalled — group of the violets, rather 

 than to the five-leaved sort. Then again under Hesperis he 

 describes the seeds of it as being enclosed in elongated and terete 

 siliques like those of the cabbage. 



For a glance at his final series of crucifers we must pass to the 

 Second Book, where the topic is that of culinary herbs and roots 

 in general. The series begins with cabbage, which is at once fol- 

 lowed by the .kales, plants the herbage of which and not the roots 

 is the useful part. At the opposite end of the line occur in order 

 the turnips, the radish, and lastly horseradish^ ; all these being so 

 called root crops, the sum of the members of the family assembled 

 at this point being seven; the line being divided according to 

 nature of the roots as fibrous or fleshy. More than that, the crucifer- 

 ous series is here again slightly interrupted ; for just after the cab- 

 bage-kale series, and before that of the real turnip-radish series, two 

 campanulaceous plants are intruded; both of them with fleshy roots 

 so turnip-like in form, and in such frequent use in cookery as 

 substitutes for turnips, that people call them wild turnips, or 

 little turnips, so that this vernacular name became turned into Latin 

 as Rapunculus,^ the earliest Latin name for the genus now long 



' Stirp. Comm., pp. 560-567. 



^Ibid., pp. 7I6-735- 



» The Latin for turnip being Rapum. 



