CXXII.— THE TORMENTIL. 
PotentUla ere eta Hampe. 
T he slender spreading trails, the flat leaves with their divergent lobes, and the 
widely-spaced petals among Potentillas attract attention to the number of 
their parts. Habit of growth, foliage, and epicalyx all make the affinity of the 
Tormentil to the Potentillas obvious ; but no less obvious is the fact that, whilst 
most Potentillas have five sepals and five petals, the Tormentil has four leaves in 
each whorl. Such considerations of mere number of parts long held botanists in 
thrall. While many species of our modern genus PotentUla have five digitate 
leaflets and were thus, as we have seen, known as Pentaphylloides or Cinquefoil, the 
stipules of the Tormentil are so large and leaf-like as to be counted as leaflets, so 
that as early as the work of Apuleius Platonicus, in the fourth or fifth century, it 
was named Septefolium (seven-leaved) ; while Fuchs and Turner in the sixteenth 
speak of it under the Greek form Heptaphyllon. 
Parkinson, a century later, is amusingly precise in this matter, though, curiously 
enough, his woodcut shows the usual four petals, while the text speaks of five. 
“ The common Tormentil/’ he says, “ (is so like unto Cinquefoile, that many doe mistake it, for it may well be reckoned as 
one of them) hath many reddish slender, weake branches, rising from the roote, lying upon the ground, or rather leaning, than 
standing upright, with many short leaves that stand closer to the stalkes, than the other Cinkefoiles doe, with the foote stalke 
encompassing the branches at severall places, but those that grow next to the ground are set upon long foote stalkes, each 
whereof are like unto the leaves of CinkefoiU^ or five leafed grasse, but somewhat longer and lesser, and dented about the 
edges, many of them divided but into five leaves, but most of them into seaven, whereof it tooke the name Setfoile . , . yet 
some may have sixe and some eight, as the fertilitie of the soile and nature list to worke : at the toppes of the branches stand 
divers small yellow flowers, consisting of five leaves, like unto those of Cinkefoile^ but smaller : the roote is smaller than 
Bistort, somewhat thicke but blacker without, and not so red within, yet sometimes a little crooked, having many blackish 
fibres thereat.” 
Commenting on the name Setfoile or Seven leaves, he adds : — 
“they are not seaven leaves, but the number is seven of the divisions of every leafe ; for to speake properly, it is but one leafe, 
cut into five or seven divisions, and not seven leaves : for this is a generall rule in all leaves, whether of herbes or of trees, 
that what leafe falleth away wholly together with his stalke and not in partes, and at severall times, is but one leafe.” 
Linne kept Tormentilla as a genus distinct from PotentUla, mainly on the ground 
of its four petals, calling this species T. erecta ; and Sir James Edward Smith defends 
his action on the ground that “ the difference is obvious, and as constant as in any 
other similar instance,” scouting Scopoli’s argument that “ a one-eyed man is no less 
a man.” Nestler, however, in his “ Monographia de Potentilla” in i8i6, named the 
plant Potentilla Tormentilla, and Necker had named it P. sylvestris as early as 1768. As, 
however, according to our present rules, the earliest specific name must, if possible, 
be retained, it bears Linnaeus’s name erecta, though the binominal Potentilla erecta was 
only published by Hampe in 1837. 
The stout, woody, almost tuberous, rhizome is red internally and extremely 
astringent, whence come the German names Rotwurtzel and Blutwurtzel, the English or 
Scottish Border equivalent of the latter. Blood-root, and the use of the plant in 
