LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 259 



place, under the generic name Sium non odoratum, he describes 

 ■what is now Veronica Beccabunga, appending to his excellent diag- 

 nosis the following : " It grows around springs which never freeze, 

 or in such ditches as are equally immune from frost during the 

 whole winter. ' ' ' Then the habitat of a second species of the genus — 

 — Veronica Anagallis aquatica is its Linnaean name — is given in 

 similar terms : " Throughout the whole winter season this keeps its 

 verdure quite untouched by frost, growing as it does in the water 

 of warm springs. " Now six chapters away from this which treats 

 of the two aquatic veronicas, and with more than as many plants 

 not allied to Veronica intervening, he describes the dry land mem- 

 bers of this same genus, but under the generic names Chamcedrys and 

 Teucrium.'^ These have retained in more recent botany those 

 generic names as specific under Veronica. 



Thus do we find that our familiar genus Veronica was all unre- 

 cognized as a whole by Tragus, its members being ranged in two 

 rather widely separated groups, bearing different generic names; 

 and all this in deference to mere ecology, as it were ; for, if those of 

 the aquatic group have a tender subsucculent and glabrous herb- 

 age holding its freshness all winter, whereas those of the dry 

 land are thin-leaved, soft-hairy, and die down to the ground in 

 autumn, and if these differences may have helped to keep the 

 groups apart, yet are they anatomical differences rather than 

 morphological. And the case can not fail to convince us of the 

 weight which ecological considerations carried in sixteenth-century 

 classifyings. Neither Tragus, however, nor any of his contempo- 

 raries had invented these ecologic distinctions. They were already 

 an old, old story. Contemplate the mere name for those 

 aquatic speedwells, Sium non odoratum. It is a generic name, 

 because there are two very clearly distinct species of it. There 

 is somewhat of early botanical history concentrated in that very 

 name. It implies beyond mistake the existence of a genus named 

 Sium odoratum. Still furl her it suggests as almost certain that the 

 name Sium odoratum is less ancient than, the other. Searching old 

 records now, we shall find that things happened exactly after the 

 naanner which the name Sium non odoratum seemed to indicate. 

 Sium odoratum, the original of all slums, was at first Sium, simply, 

 that is, a monotypic genus. More than a thousand years before 

 Tragus, and maybe two thousand or three, the Greeks had known, 

 and had used medicinally, an aquatic of springs and spring runs 



1 Stirp. Comm., p. 187. 



2 Ibid., pp. 203-209. 



