New Genera of American Plants

by its scent original: halitu, but only by the appearance of the whole plant, namely by the arrangement of the leaves and the willow-like stems. These are therefore the most auspicious instructions original: institutiones; referring to Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's Institutiones Rei Herbariae which freed me both from errors in distinguishing plants and from the Catalog I was intending to produce. For it pleased the most kind author of those Botanical Institutions Tournefort to insert into his own work those plants of already certain and known genera that I had drawn and described in the American Islands The West Indies, and to establish certain new genera from some of an unknown type. But there remained many more whose genera were still undiscovered by us, and for which new genera had to be established by necessity from their flowers and fruits, so that hereafter no question or doubt might be raised among Botanists regarding such plants. It was therefore my pleasure, for the sake of the curious and for Botanists, to mark these uncertain plants with certain genera, impressing upon them the character of their genus from the structure of their flowers and fruits, and taking the nomenclature of the genera partly from the books of Indian Plumier refers here to the indigenous knowledge and names used by the people of the Caribbean botanists, and partly from the names of certain more celebrated Botanists or lovers of botany; for in this way it pleased powerful justice to forbid praiseworthy men from dying in the archives original: chartis; literally "on paper" or "in writings", and to encircle their hair with the laurel earned by their merits.

Paris, from the Convent of the Minims at the Place Royale The Minims were a religious order to which Plumier belonged; their convent in Paris was a hub of scientific activity, April 27, 1703.

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