As you might have suspected from the length of yesterday’s post, it turns out that there is a lot behind a scientific name. The name, in this case, being Bejaria/Befaria racemosa, the only member of a small neotropical genus to occur in North America. The common name is tarflower, and the plant occurs in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.
Yesterday I mentioned that my guide to Florida’s scrub plants, by Austin and Bass, mentioned a tantalizing bit of history in their description of Befaria [sic] racemosa: derived from “a Spanish officer named Bexar.” Since I couldn’t find any information about this particular Bexar, I emailed Dr. Austin, hoping to get some information about the derivation. And he came through, in spades…
The most valuable reference Dan sent was this article by Steven E. Clemants (the link to JSTOR will show you the first page; those of you with institutional access or [rara avis indeed] personal subscriptions can access the entire paper), the name given to the genus in 1767 by its original describer, Jose Celestino Mutis, was Bejaria. For some reason, though, Linnaeus misread the name in the letter Mutis sent him with the description, and so Befaria became the “correct” spelling of this genus, despite its being named in honor of Mutis’s close friend, Don Bejar of Cadiz (Cl. Dn. Bejar Botanices Professoris Gadensis).
“Some reason” turns out to be a very good reason, As Clemants writes, “Linnaeus’s misspelling probably resulted from his misinterpreting Mutis’s handwriting, because Mutis made his “j” with a high ascending stroke that looks like an “f”. I’ll say. Here is a scan of the spelling in Mutis’s original letter to Linnaeus describing the genus (Clemants’s article has a full page, but I reproduce here only the most pertinent part–I don’t want to break any kind of copyright!):
Can we really blame Linnaeus for “misspelling” the genus name? Clemants’s article, though, seems to have set the record straight, both as to the correct spelling of the genus name (the “proposal” in the title of the article, to rename the genus, was accepted straightaway; the ICBN lists Bejaria as correct) and the correct type specimen (B. glauca as the actual type Mutis described as B. aestuans). Tropicos.org implies that the name was corrected because the original description was “illegitimate” (nom. illeg.), although I prefer to “misread” nomen illegitimum (“validly published name, but one that contravenes some of the articles of the IBC”) as “nomen illegibilis” in this case!
Now, as to who exactly “Cl. Dn. Bejar Botanices Professoris Gadensis” might have been, well, that will probably have to wait for another installment of What’s in a Name? Stay tuned…