244 LEAFLETS. 



the affirmative. His very name for the species he took from 

 the descriptive phrases of Joncquet, Boccone and Morison. 

 Thus did he most positively and unmistakably identify his 

 plant with theirs. It were perhaps better not to say " his 

 plant," for really L,innaeus had no plant of it either alive or 

 dead and dry. He knew it only by the accounts given of it 

 by those earlier authors ; so it may be more accurate to say 

 that he took out of their texts their own descriptive phrase 

 foliis androsaemi, and made it a specific name for their species. 



Now comes the other question. Is that plant — the plant of 

 Linnaeus, as we may say — the same which we American bota- 

 nists of the nineteenth century were taught by all our masters, 

 to call by that name A. androsaemifoliumf The facts give to 

 this a negative answer. Our masters, the whole succession of 

 them for a hundred years, were wrong in what they instructed 

 us to receive for that species. That I was the first to call 

 attention to this matter, and to propose names for things 

 wrongly called A . androsaemifolium iu our books is a condition 

 under which I may without presumption tell what the plant 

 was like which I, mistaught, and during a half-century of 

 botanical observation, received as the A. androsaemifolium of 

 Linnaeus. Its distinctive marks were, and are, a rather small 

 number of pinkish or purplish nodding bell-shaped flowers 

 inserted by short stalklets in the axils of the two, or even 

 three, uppermost pairs of leaves of the plant, with also a some- 

 what more numerous short bunch of them at the summit of 

 the branch. They were not at all numerous, and the aggre- 

 gate of the flowers in the axillary clusters was greater than 

 the aggregate of those in the one terminal cluster. In brief, 

 the little inflorescences were axillary and terminal, the flowers 

 beautiful but few. Apocynums answering that description as 

 to their manner of flowering I was familiar with very long ago 

 in New England, and later on the woodland borders of far- 

 western prairies ; and every man who pretended to know 

 plants, and every book of botany that was available said this 

 was A. androsaemifolium. Linn. Almost every book assigned 

 that species the mark of ' ' flowers lateral and terminal ' ' or 



