LXXI. — THE WINTER ACONITE. 
Eranthis hyemalis Salisbury. 
A n examination of the career of Richard Antony Markham (who took the name 
of Salisbury after arriving at man’s estate), which after this lapse of time is 
naturally impartial, compels us to recognise that we can more easily respect his 
talents as a botanist than his character as a man. He seems frequently to have 
appropriated the results of the work of other botanists and to have hurriedly 
published descriptions of their discoveries under names of his own devising. This 
aroused so much feeling against him among his contemporaries that they did less 
than justice to his undoubted critical acumen. Salisbury was born at Leeds in 1761 
and died in London in 1829. He is said to have been descended from Henry Lyte, 
the translator of Dodoens’s “ Herball ” in the time of Elizabeth. On its foundation 
he became the first secretary of what is now the Royal Horticultural Society ; and 
for , a time he owned the house and garden at Mill Hill which had belonged to 
Peter Collinson, the correspondent of Linnaeus, and which now forms part of 
Mill Hill School. 
The genus Eranthis was described by him in the “ Transactions of the Linnean 
Society,” in 1 807, its name being formed from iyp, er, or tap, ear. Spring, and 
av 0 os, anthos, a flower, or more probably from the verb avOLi^oi, anthizo, I strew 
with flowers. It comprises some half-dozen species of small herbaceous perennials, 
natives of the Northern Temperate regions of the Old World. They have a short, 
thick rhizome, or row of tubers, to which one is added annually ; and the palmately- 
lobed radical leaves are more delicate in texture than those of the genus Helleborus. 
Their flowers are solitary, terminal, and pale yellow, and are surrounded at a very 
slightly lower level with a whorl of three deeply-cleft sessile leaves, which are 
variously termed an involucre, as in Anemone, or involucriform cauline leaves. 
There are from five to eight imbricate, narrow, petaloid, and deciduous sepals ; 
while the petals are represented by a few small tubular nectaries or honey-leaves. 
These have a slender stalk or claw, somewhat as in the Christmas Rose {Helleborus 
niger Linne), this stalk being as long as the upper tubular part ; but this tube is 
two-lipped, each lip being notched or emarginate. It has been plausibly suggested 
that the shorter inner lip represents the little scale which in the Buttercup covers 
over the nectary at the base of the petal, and that in this genus this scale is adnate 
by its margins to the petal, thus forming a honey-containing tube. It is an 
interesting fact that in Goldilocks {Ranunculus auricomus Linne) a series of 
modifications of the base of the petals has been observed, some of which exhibit 
a bifid inner adnate scale very similar to that in Eranthis ; whilst in flowers of the 
Winter Aconite itself we may often see all kinds of gradations between these 
tubular petals and the flat, scaleless sepals. The stamens are numerous and spirally 
arranged ; and there are five or six distinct, many-ovuled carpels having a short 
