LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 30I 



through the ages its name had been Chelidonium minus. Cordus, 

 as a university lecturer on Dioscorides, by the acuteness and origi- 

 nality of his genius, had made himself famous at the age of twenty- 

 three years. To have given any Dioscoridean plant a new name 

 would have been venturesome. He had been bold enough when, 

 afterwards, in his own Historia Plantar um he had indicated the 

 plants' intimate relationship to Ranunculus rather than to true 

 celandine, This, to my mind, seems the explanation of the incon- 

 sistency referred to. The inconsistency is, however, more than 

 condoned by the neat item of constr^ictive taxonomy with which it 

 is intimately connected. 



I have never been able to comprehend the view point of the pro- 

 fessedly natural systematist who fails to perceive a most intimate 

 relationship as subsisting between Ficaria and the plant called 

 Caltha palustris. With Cordus the type last named was new. 

 The German peasantry had always known the plant, and had their 

 several vernacular names for it; but the botanist became con- 

 vinced that botanically it was unnamed and un described; and then> 

 like an accomplished expert in the detection of affinities — a master 

 in taxonomy — ^locates it close against Chelidonium minus, i.e., 

 Ficaria, and to accentuate the expression of this relationship, names 

 the new type Chelidonium palustre,^ this to be understood, I doubt 

 not, as a binary generic name, just as Chelidonium minus was un- 

 derstood to be ; for no one now thought of this as a mere species of 

 the celandine. 



Even as to the conception of a species Cordus is so far in ad- 

 vance of his own time as to appear quite abreast of Toumefort, 

 who flourished a hundred and fifty years later. Among the botanical 

 fables that have passed for history, none is more familiar than that 

 Linnaeus was first to clearly recognize varieties; but Cordus seems 

 to realize the difference between species and variety as well as if 

 he had lived in the nineteenth century. The instances of his men- 

 tioning varieties are not numerous, but they suffice to show that 

 he discriminated them readily enough. The double-flowered 

 buttercup which he calls Ranunculus coronarius'^ he describes with 

 the utmost brevity, remarking that it is not a proper species, but is 

 a "factitious" thing of the gardens. 



In giving full account of the Viburnum Opulus and its ornamental 

 variety the Snowball Bush which appears so different he is careful 

 to say that there is really no difference between the two save this, 



• Hist. PI., p. 122. 



» Ibid., p. 120'. 



