FRAGRANCE IN THE NATURAL ORDERS 213 Trees. There are many first-hand comments on blossom fragrance and especially on hybrids, there is no bibliography, but a useful index. To conclude this survey is a very remarkable book Medicinal and Per- fumery Plants and Herbs of Ireland, which contains much useful information I have not come across elsewhere. ODOROGRAPHIA It remains, however, to comment upon the most important practical source-book of all. Two volumes appeared in 1892-1894, by J. C. Sawer, under the title of Odorographia, and described as "A natural history of raw materials and drugs used in the perfume industry." The author comments upon the inaccessibility of information available to readers interested in this subject and he gives a bibliography of the 240 sources from which he has abstracted. In Volume I he allocates to 18 well-defined Fragrance Sectors the odours of common items as well as a large selection of the lesser-known Oriental and Occidental wild and cultivated plants. There is much, however, yet to be recorded, but among some of the very interesting items which have almost automatically emerged during the study of this text is, for example, the surprising information that the Jasmin-like scent is found in at least a dozen Natural Orders and in some instances blossoms are reported to be more j asminique in odour than Jasmin itself. Volume II is essentially a Flora Medica cure Aromatica, covering both hemispheres. In passing, I would mention that in other than these books the Essential Oil texts of Gildemeister and Hoffman, Parry, Finnemore and Guenther, the Garden Encyclop•edias and Miss Rohde's books, the all- important Natural Orders are not named. THE NATURAL ORDERS From the Systema Naturae developed by Linnaeus (1707-1778), for classi- fying the known species of plants and animals, there has gradually evolved the binomial system of nomenclature as we now know it, in a way, a kind of botanist's equivalent of the Mendelevian arrangement of the chemical elements by first drawing upon the substantive names already in existence, thus indicating the name of the genus and qualifying this by suitable adjec- tives to describe the species and variations. The botanical nomenclature is, however, somewhat complicated and sometimes very confusing, for there are many names awkward to pronounce and meaningless until help regarding their origin is obtained from the Latin and Greek lexicons. At the outset, and Anglicised from the Latin, we find a dozen easily

214 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS named scented families, the gentians, geraniums, iris lilies, orchids, poppies, primroses, solanums, valerians, verbenas and violets, the noun bearing the suffix -aceae, hence the families--Geraniaceae and so on, familiar to us as garden plants. But when we turn to an elementary botany text we find that the first Order is so placed because of the simplicity of its structure or botanical architecture, and named the Ranunculaceae, with an English sub- title as the crowfoot family. Here, upon reference to the Latin dictionary, we find that rana means a small frog, as most of the species flower in marshy situations at a time when the young frogs first appear, and we are introduced to Ranunculus bulbosa, familiar to everyone as the golden-yellow butter-cup of the meadows. On second thoughts, as it were, we find that the alternative common name of crow-foot is due to a fancied resemblance of the leaves of many species to a crow's foot. Statistically, we may note that this Order is repre- sented by some 35 genera and upwards of 1,100 species, therefore as a prelude to the search for fragrance, a list of these 35 genera must first be made followed by an examination of the species. THE TECHNICAL NOMENCLATURE OF THE NATURAL ORDERS Many of these Orders are named after classical celebrities, for instance the physician Euphorbius, others, like the Thymelaceae record the metamorphosis of the Goddess Daphne into a laurel bush, while there are those of com- paratively modern allocation to commemorate the names of famous botanists, such as the Gesneraceae, Loganiaceae and so on, and genera which are per- petuated, often somewhat uncouthly by such substantives as Clarkia, Jonesii and so forth. The basic pattern, however, involves the construction of informative cronpound terms, hybrids of Latin and/or Greek, for example the Thymdaceae, thymus hinting at the thyme-like blossoms and elaia, the fragrant wild olive. THE DIVERSE SOURCES OF THE NATURAL AROMATICS We must also recognize the aromatic amplitude, for fragrances arise from the humble mosses, lichens and grasses, cacti and fungi, from plants, ferns and climbers to trees hundreds of feet in height, and it is not only the blossoms and foliage which yield fragrance, but we must also go to the buds, berries, beans, pods, seeds, roots, rhizomes, twigs, the wood itself, the bark, to the gums, lacs and other resinous exudations naturally or artificially induced, while in several instances, insects or moulds initiate certain struc- tural changes before the material is ready for processing.