372 
Prain . — The Mer curia lineae and 
Africa and grown at Leiden which Hermann intended to figure ; in his 
posthumous catalogue of 1698 it was named Mercurialis africana dicoccos , 
folio violae tricoloris (Par. Bat., App. 10). In 1720 Boerhaave included 
this plant in his genus Ricinokarpos (Ind. alt. Lugd.-Bat., i. 254) as R. afra : 
Mercurialis procumbens, dicoccos , Africana, folio violae tricoloris , thus modi- 
fying Hermann’s name and adding the epithet ‘ procumbens ’. In 1737 
Burmann, in his list of Hermann’s African plants (Thes. Zeyl., App. 16), 
again modified Hermann’s name by shortening it to Mercurialis africana , 
minor , lucid a. 
The plant which bore these names at Leiden is known from specimens 
in the British Museum (Natural History) collection written up by Gronovius 
as ‘ Ricinocarpus afra, B. Ind. 1, 254 syn. Mercurialis procumbens dicoccos 
africana folio violae tricoloris, Par. B., Ap. 10 H The same herbarium 
includes another specimen of the plant from Clifford’s garden. Linnaeus 
did not enumerate the species in the ‘ Hortus Cliffortianus ’ in 1737, and the 
legend with this specimen, ‘Ricinocarpus afra Mercurialis Linn. Gen. 910 
afra *, which must date from after 1742, was not written by him. But the 
species was apparently accounted for in the ‘ Viridarium Clififortianum ’ in 
1737 ; in 1740 Royen (FI. Leyd. Prodr., 203) recorded M. androgyna , Linn. 
(Virid. Cliff., 98), as being Hermann’s African Mercurialis — Boerhaave’s 
African Ricinokarpos . Moreover, in 1753 (Sp. PL, ed. 1, 1036) Linnaeus 
not only accepted Royen’s identification of M. androgyna , Linn., with 
Boerhaave’s African ‘ Ricinokarpos ’ ; he substituted for his own term 
‘androgyna’ the word ‘procumbens’ which Boerhaave had intercalated 
in Hermann’s name. Besides, in 1753 and again in 1755, Linnaeus, as 
Dr. Jackson has shown the writer, noted the presence in his own herbarium 
of the plant whose name had thus been changed from M. andogyna to 
M. procumbens. 
When Boerhaave defined Ricinokarpos he characterized it as a genus 
with 3-coccous capsules, and included in it two species. The first of these, 
R. afra , which is Mercurialis procumbens , Linn., he did not describe 
in full ; we know, however, that its capsules are 2-coccous, and that it 
does not accord with the generic definition. The second species, which 
Boerhaave named ‘ R. americana flore albo spicato folio circaeae acutiori \ 
was raised at Leiden from seed collected by Hartog between Berbice and 
Surinam. This species has 3-coccous capsules, and does accord with the 
generic definition. This latter plant appears to have been lost at Leiden 
between 1720 and 1737; it is not included in the Cliffortian ‘Hortus’ or 
‘ Viridarium ’ of 1737, or in Royen’s ‘ Prodromus ’ of 1740. 
The circumstance that Ricinokarpos , Boerh., was a complex of two 
genera led to some misunderstanding. Possibly because the only part of 
Ricinokarpos which he knew was the African part, Linnaeus in 1737 (Gen. 
PL. ed. 1, 307) reduced Boerhaave’s genus to 756 Mercurialis , Tournef., 
