previous next

CHAP. 59.—PLANTS CLASSIFIED ACCORDING TO THEIR STEMS: THE CORONOPUS, THE ANCHUSA, THE ANTHEMIS, THE PHYLLANTHES, THE CREPIS, AND THE LOTUS.

Some, again, among the prickly plants have a stem which creeps along the ground, that, for instance, known as the "coronopus."1 On the other hand, the anchusa,2 the root of which is employed for dyeing wood and wax, has an upright stem; which is the case also with some of the plants that are prickly in a less degree, the anthemis,3 for example, the phyl- lanthes,4 the anemone, and the aphace:5 the crepis,6 again, and the lotus,7 have a foliated stem.

1 The Cochlearia coronopus. See B. xxii. c. 22.

2 The Anchusa tinctoria, probably, or dyers' alkanet. See B. xxii. c. 23.

3 See B. xxii. c. 26.

4 It has not been identified with any degree of certainty: the Centaurea nigra and the Campanula rapunculus have been named.

5 See B. xxvii. c. 21: also c. 52 of this Book. The name appears to have been given to both the Leontodon taraxacum and the Lathyrus aphaca of modern botany.

6 Theophrastus has Picris in the parallel passage, Hist. Plant. B. vii. c. 9, the Helminthia echioides of Linnæus. If "Crepis" is the correct reading, that plant has not been identified.

7 The herbaceous kinds are no doubt those alluded to.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (2 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: