Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 1 (1791).djvu/205



''XVI. Observations on the Genus of Begonia. By Jonas Dryander, M. A. '' ''Libr. R. S. and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Stockholm,'' Fellow of the Linnean Society.

HE Genus of Begonia was first established by Plumier, and published in 1700 by Tournefort, in the Appendix to his Institutiones Rei Herbariae, three years before the Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera of Plumier appeared. From Tournefort, Linnaeus introduced it in the first edition of his Genera Plantarum, among the Fragmenta, or such genera as were not sufficiently described to be referred to their proper classes; and in the second edition it still remains in the Appendix: but in the fifth and sixth editions he refers it to Polygamia Monœcia, though without any alteration in the description of the genus from that in the first edition. In the thirteenth edition of the Systema Vegetabilium this genus first found its proper place in the Linnean Syftem, which is, Monoecia Polyandria.

Ludwig, in the first edition of his Definitiones Plantarum (1737), introduces it very improperly in his fifth class, Plantae flore perfecto simplici regulari pentapetalo. But in the second edition (1747) he gives it in the Appendix, among Fragmenta varia; and Boehmer also in the third edition (1760) refers it to Plantas dubiae. Linnæus,