ORIGIN OF NAME STROBUS 9 
earlier day. We can recall peg-tops, whipping-tops, 
and humming-tops, and probably there are many 
more revolving tops than these, whose existence has 
escaped our memories. What was the shape of a 
standardized Roman top in the Augustan Era it 
would be presumptuous to hazard opinion upon; 
but if it was more or less the same sort of top as its 
Great Britain representative of the Victorian Era— 
that is to say, a sort of top-heavy-shaped object, 
sometimes answering the description of pear-shaped, at 
others and by others described, as an inverted conoid, 
with a weighty head supported by a slender peg— 
there would, I imagine, among Mediterranean Pines be 
claimants in number for the honour of a name con- 
ferred by such a celebrity, since many a Pine in those 
regions assumes a shape consonant with this rather 
discursive description. Personally, I should have 
looked to the P. Pinea to turn up the winner among 
all other competitors. 
Whether it is an ascertained truism that Pliny’s 
Strobus and Linnzus’s Weymbuth Pine are one and 
the same is a point of evidence that we do not believe 
even the great Swede himself, with all his glory, and 
founder of the Linnean Society, who christened it or 
rechristened it some 1700 years and more after 
Pliny’s day, could conscientiously have sworn 
affidavit upon. But why cavil at a name that is 
both brief and easily spelt, and so long as it distin- 
guishes, and creates no confusion of mind? 
There is a provoking similitude both of cones and 
leaves in the construction of four at least of this 
group (P. Excelsa, Peuke, Monticola, and Strobus), 
which calls for a strained docility on thé part of the 
ordinary student. The points of difference in some 
cases are so slight that they belong rather to that 
class of subtle intricacies that many do not care to 
tackle. Those there are who only can, or only 
