EARLISR HISTORY OF OUR DOGBANES. — I. 245 



else ' ' terminal and lateral . " I cite briefly rather a long line of 

 the masters who give the species that character : Michaux 

 (1803), Pursh (1814), Bigelow (1814, 1817, 1824), Elliott 

 (1821), Torrey (1824), Darlington (1826, 1837, 1853), Ra- 

 finesque (1828), Eaton & Wright (l840). Darby (1855), A. 

 Wood, in all his editions, Chapman (i860). 



The long while I was in error as to the identity of the afore- 

 said dogbane, I was so by reason of my unwavering faith in 

 the authorities ; and they were all wrong. If we now turn to 

 Linnaeus, who, as they all say, gave that name to that plant, 

 we learn that his plant had only terminal flowers ; and it is 

 not alone his brief diagnosis which so affirms. The figures, 

 both of Boccone and of Morison which he cites, present a 

 plant with decidedly numerous flowers, all in a terminal cymose 

 panicle. To their plant both of them applied the descriptive 

 phrase foliis androsaemi, and Linnaeus did no more than adopt 

 that as a name for the selfsame type . I have no evidence that 

 Linnaeus ever saw so much as a dried specimen or fragment 

 of the plant ; and all that he says about it he may have taken 

 out of Boccone and Morison, whom he cites as the authorities 

 on it. 



At the time of this writing there are several species of dog- 

 bane known which have pink or purplish flowers all in strictly 

 terminal cymes. The best of them belong to the far off 

 western side of the Continent, and were therefore unknown 

 until late in the nineteenth century. There are, however, in- 

 dications of the existence here at the East of two or three 

 which will more or less nearly answer to the real androsaemi- 

 folium of Joncquet, Boccone, Morison and Linnaeus ; but 

 before proceeding to such, let us take note of one of those 

 graver misrepresentations of that species which at one time 

 and another have appeared in books. 



I should much like to see such a plant as that which Jacob 

 Bigelow more than ninety years ago, in his admirable Medical 

 Botany, figured for A. androsaemifolium. It departs widely 

 from the anciently published and true thing in two important 

 particulars if not in three. Its flowers, however well at agree- 



