Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/54

 genera; it is only from the name that we know that several species belong to one genus; we might almost believe that the characters of the genus are intended to be supplied by the strange etymological explanation appended in italics to the generic name. These fanciful etymologies maintained themselves to the end of the 17th century, when Tournefort did battle with them; they were an evil which sprang in a great measure from Aristotelian and scholastic modes of thought, and from the belief that it was possible to conceive of the nature of a thing from the original meaning of its name.

Nothing shows better the earnestness of Bauhin's research than the fact, that he devoted the labour of forty years to his 'Pinax,' in order to show how each one of the species given by him was named by earlier botanists. The example already given from Fuchs shows how many names a plant had received by the middle of the 16th century; even in Dioscorides and Pliny we find a whole row of names given for a single plant, and the botanists of Fuchs' time used their utmost endeavours to attach the names in Dioscorides and other ancient writers to particular plants found in central Europe. Dioscorides, Theophrastus, and Pliny either add no descriptions to the names of their plants, or they describe them in so unsatisfactory a manner, that it was a very difficult task for the science of that day, as it is still for us, to recognise the plants of the ancient writers; hence arose such a confusion of names that the reader of a botanical work can never be sure whether the plant of one author is the same as that of another with the same name. A description of a plant is therefore usually accompanied in the 16th century by a critical enquiry how far the name used agrees with that of other authors. Kaspar Bauhin sought to put an end to this condition of uncertainty by his 'Pinax,' in which he showed in the case of all species known to him what were the names given to them by the earlier writers, and he has thus enabled us to see our way through the nomenclature of the period of which we are speaking; the 'Pinax' is in a word the