LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 3tl 



cranberry is one of these. He says he found it growing "in wild and 

 very wet and soft mossy bogs ; often with the sundew not far away. " i 

 Then, under his description of the sundew itself — also new — we 

 learn that he found that, though as a neighbor to the cranberry, 

 yet in soil distinctly of another character, that is, "in very wet 

 sandy places. "2 



In the case of that new generic type which he denominates 

 Moschatella { = Adoxa, Linn.) he mentions its most interesting 

 associates. "It grows in shady places, under trees, in soil very rich, 

 along with the fumariaceous kind" of Celandine { = Corydalis cava) 

 and also the ranunculaceous Celandine ( =Ficaria ranunculoides ^)." 



Cordus knows at least one specific type which, as he observes, 

 has a way of establishing itself upon some diversity of soils, and 

 adapting itself to several different kinds of locality; and the phases 

 which it assumes according to its altered environment so much 

 interest him that he gives a particular account of them. The 

 subject is the shrub Spartium sco par ium A He says: "It inhabits 

 rough places on mountains in a hard reddish soil somewhat sandy, 

 as in Hesse, etc. ; but sometimes occurs on the lowest plains in mere 

 sand and gravel, as about Nuremberg, etc. Nor should it be left 

 unmentioned that while on sandy plains it is a low bush seldom 

 exceeding a yard in height; on the mountains, where the soil is 

 better, it approaches the dimensions of a tree, with a trunk from 

 seven to nine feet high and so thick that one can not span around 

 it, supporting a head of virgate branches so dense as to intercept 

 and hold all the snow of a considerable storm, so that the traveller, 

 passing through such a wood in winter, may walk on almost bare 

 ground under arches of snow overhead." 



There is no indication that the author would distinguish even 

 as varieties these rather strikingly different phases of the shrub. 

 He regards them as the natural products of different conditions as 

 affecting a simple species. It is the well skilled botanist's view, 

 whether of the sixteenth century or of the twentieth. 



Pomology. The recognition of marked varieties in the same 

 species of cultivated fruits — varieties originating under cultivation 

 — is so very ancient that there is no hope of one's ever tracing it to 



1 Hist. PL, p. 140- 



J Ibid., p. 86. 



3 Ibid., p. 17 2^ 



* Ibid., p. i8g, as Genista angulosa; where] the editor, Gesner, made the 

 inexcusable error of inserting Tragus' wood cut of the extremely different 

 Genista sagittalis. 



