306 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
presumed to have been the October previous to the publication of his 
" I cones." 
The third volume of the same work, which was published three 
years later, contains the figures and descriptions of two other varieties 
called by him D. rosea (tab. 265) and D. coccinea (tab. 266), and the 
observation added by him after the latter was : ' ' Tres hucusque novimus 
Dahliae species. Prima est flore pleno, cuius color coeruleo-rubens ; 
secunda flore simplici, coloris rosei ; tertia coccinei." It is essential 
for the reader to bear this in mind, as it will be necessary to refer 
to these names further on. All these figures by Cavanilles are 
uncoloured. 
These three Dahlias were introduced into France in 1802. Andre 
Thouin gives coloured figures and a lengthy description of them in 
1804. (See " Annales du Museum," vol. hi., p. 420 et seq.) The plant 
does not seem to have reached Germany till some time between 
1800 and 1805, and although George W. Johnson * tells us that 
Willdenow changed the name Dahlia to Georgina in 1803 it will be 
found that that author had done so long before, because in his 
" Species Plantarum," tomus iii., pars iii., p. 2124, Cavanilles' 
Dahlia is described under the name Georgina, which was given to it 
by the German botanist in honour, it is said, of Professor Georgi, a 
Russian traveller and botanist. 
In 1802 John Fraser, of Chelsea, procured D. coccinea from France 
and flowered it the following year. A coloured figure and descrip- 
tion appear in the " Botanical Magazine " (tab. 762). It also seems 
that in 1803 Mr. Woodford, of Vauxhall, flowered D. rosea in his 
garden there, his plant also being obtained from France. 
It was at this point that my suspicions were first aroused, for in the 
references to Fraser's and Woodford's flowers there is no mention 
of any previous introduction, and yet it is plainly stated by so many 
English authorities that the flower was first introduced here in 1789. 
It is most remarkable that for quite a century every English authority 
on the Dahlia repeats the same story. None of them ever seems to 
have questioned it. And yet how singular such an occurrence must 
have been ? A plant newly imported into Spain from Mexico, a plant 
unknown, unbloomed, unnamed, undescribed, the first variety of 
which was not figured and described till 1791, was actually, according 
to these English writers in the periodical press and in their special 
monographs on the flower, first introduced into England from Madrid 
in the same year as it reached Cavanilles there. The thing, on the 
face of it, was not only highly improbable but impossible, and I shall 
show the means by which such a conclusion was finally arrived at. 
How widespread this error is may be proved from a few extracts 
from some of the leading authorities. The first of them, and without 
needlessly multiplying them, is Phillips, who in 1829, in his " Flora 
Historica," vol. ii., p. 353, says : " It was introduced to this country 
* " The Dahlia : its Culture, Uses, and History," 1847, 
