i96p , SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



that never freeze. It had the foliage and the pleasantly odoroua 

 quality of certain umbellifers, as Dioscorides had intimated*;, 

 and this was Sium^; and centuries later when up in middle Europe 

 men versed in the materia medica looked in wild springy places for 

 the Sium of Dioscorides, and more often found there those different 

 things, unknown to the ancients, which though green in midwinter 

 were odorless, and therefore not the real thing, and named them 

 Sium non odoratum, they were proceeding upon the principle 

 that both, and all such plants, being generated as most of them 

 believed, by spring water and the earth at the bottom, were naturally 

 allied, and might all be named so many kinds of Sium. Further- 

 more, the establishment of such a name as Sium non odoratum 

 rendered it needful that original Sium should be invested with a 

 cognomen in order to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. 

 Hence its later generic name Sium odoratum. 



That this sium, constant inhabitant of springs and warm drainage 

 ditches, is classed not ecologically but morphologically by Tragus 

 argues no inconsistency. It would be one thing for a sixteenth- 

 century botanist to fail to recognize by morphologic marks the 

 membership of the ScrophulariacecB, and quite another thing to 

 miss the family characters of any umbellifer. Sium at first glance, 

 as well as by its properties, is unmistakably an umbellifer; and the 

 time is not to be found in the annals of botany when this family 

 had not obtained general recognition, marked as it is both morpho- 

 logically and qualitatively. The family, so-called, to which the 

 veronicas belong is not so. The ScrophulariacecB have never yet 

 been circumscribed otherwise than most arbitrarily and unsatis- 

 factorily. Tragus understood well the superiority of morphologic 

 over ecologic criteria, and that the latter are to cede to the 

 former when the former are manifest. The anthologic harmony 

 between hardy undying water veronicas and the tender perishable 

 kinds of dry meadows and uplands it was not given him to see; 

 nor, indeed, to any one until long after Tragus' day. And yet, an 

 umbellifer to him was an umbellifer whether hydrophilous or xero- 

 philous. But in the arranging of his umbelliferous genera it will be 

 observed that the two aquatic genera Sium and Apium are placed 

 side by side.^ 



To the botanist of the fields, the plains, the marshes and the 



■ Diosc, Book ii, ch. 120. 



' The plant is Sium angustifolium Linn., type of the genus, though now 

 called Berula angustifoUa. 

 > Stifp. Comm., pp. 464, 465. 



