Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 12.djvu/280

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The male and female Pæeonies of Theophrastus, Pliny and Dioscorides are ascertained to be the plants that were known by those names after the revival of letters. Clusius, of the sixteenth century, seems to have been the first who made any addition to these. That truly original writer describes the plants he saw during his travels with a clearness which, considering the infant state of science at the time, deserves more praise than seems to have been bestowed on him. A number of botanical authors towards the close of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century, chiefly copying him and each other, increased the catalogue; but their descriptions are in general so ill defined, and so replete with inaccuracies, that much information cannot be obtained from them. John Bauhin and our countryman Morison are the principal writers, after Clusius, who can be depended upon, till the days of Linné; and his opinions upon Pæonies were singular and erroneous.

In the Hortus Cliffortianus, his earliest publication, in 1737, he discloses doubts on the subject by observing underneath P. officinalis — "Qui considerat notas essentiales structuramque plantæ, non potest non palpitare vastum istum apud authores numerum, non nisi meris varietatibus constare." He afterwards makes up his mind; and in the first edition of Species Plantarum reduces all the

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