STUDiaS OF THAilCTRACEAB — I. 51 



The earliest trivial name in any way representing an 

 American white-flowered member of this genus is the Thalie- 

 trum Canadense of Cornutus. It is of the year 1635. That 

 author's using an e rather than a f in the second syllable of 

 the generic name bespeaks a doubt that existed in the minds 

 of earlier botanical scholars as to whether the name was 

 intended of old to be Thalietrum or Thalictrum. For almost 

 two centuries the validity of T. Canadense was unquestioned. 

 Tournefort, like others of his time, sustained it, and of course 

 under the name at first assigned. lyinnaeus in his day sup- 

 pressed the then well established T. Canadense and renamed 

 the species T. Cornuti. The change was as arbitrary as possi- 

 ble, yet the new ndme became current almost everywhere ; 

 and in, I think, all American books of botany down to the 

 beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Dur- 

 ing about 140 years, then, every kind of tall panicled meadow 

 rue displaying clavate white filaments was named T. Cornuti ; 

 then all at once, and with little by way of apology, the best 

 known of American botanists dismissed the name T. Cornuti 

 and put in its place T. polygamum, a nomen nudum printed 

 long, long ago by Muhlenberg. From 1895 forward to the 

 present, books and catalogues sustain, on the mere word of 

 Gray, the name T. polygamum. This is an outline statement 

 only, and appertains to the history of the nomenclature of 

 this type in our own country more particularly ; but the 

 aggregate species had been studied with care nowhere but in 

 Europe ; and we shall have to look to one of the greatest 

 botanists of Europe to see what the real reasons were for sup- 

 pressing I,innaeus' trivial name T. Cornuti. Asa Gray tells 

 us (Syn. Fl. I, 18) that the necessity of this had been sug- 

 gested by De Candolle (1818). This eminent botanist appears 

 to have been the first to critically examine the page and plate 

 of Cornutus, and in doing this he could but discover that both 

 plate and description apply to no other plant but the Old 

 World T. aquilegifolium. T. Canadense ol Cornutus, Tourne- 

 fortius and others, as well as T. Cornuti, lyinn., were but 

 synonyms of T. aquilegifolium, and all must be suppressed. 



