LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 26l 



mountains it is easy to recall the special habitat of almost any 

 plant, but not so the average time of its flowering year by year. 

 To be able to say that this shrub will be found in bloom about the 

 middle of May, that tree in the early part of May, this flower 

 appears late in March, the other in the last days of April, is not likely 

 to be a matter of unaided memory. To know the average time of 

 flowering for everything that grows involves the keeping of written 

 notes through years. Tragus tells this time of the annual flowering 

 of things in almost every chapter of his book; and he is the first' of 

 botanical authors to have done this. 



Transmutation. Though much given to diversifying his botan- 

 ical pages by bits of invective against superstitions that are of 

 theologic type. Tragus has never doubted the easy transmutability 

 of wheat and rye into chess. In a long chapter he demonstrates to 

 his readers how this may and does come to pass, under various 

 conditions. And here some experimentations of his own are 

 recorded : " That it is possible for seeds of one species to degenerate 

 and become so changed as to come up as another species is some- 

 thing which I have learned by experience ; for from very old cabbage 

 seed sown by my own hands I have raised a crop of turnips."' 

 At another place he has the following upon the same subject: 

 " There are those who think that a sowing of turnip seed upon very 

 dry and sandy ground, especially if the seed be very old, will come 

 up as wild mustard; or at least in that which is as much of the 

 nature of mustard as of that of turnip. In the same fashion 

 cabbage seed very commonly changes into that of a poor and 

 stunted kind of turnip, as I myself have often proven by 

 experiment."^ 



Again in his dissertation upon wheat he reports a certain dark- 

 grained kind as apt to appear intermixed with the other in the 

 low moist parts of the fields; so dark — ^blackish is his word — as to 

 render flour and bread from such admixture dark-colored. He in 

 perfect confidence accepts this admixture of dark-grained as another 

 instance of transmutation; has never a suspicion that it is 

 another variety of wheat, the seed of which was mixed by chance, 

 in the sowing, with the other. 



The case is one entirely apart from that of the melampyrum, or 

 black wheat, of a totally different plant alliance, the seed of which, 

 accidentally harvested with the grain and ground with it also 



' Stirp. Comm., p. 668. 

 » Ibid., pp. loi, 102. 



