Columbine
Columbine names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Columbine a fragrant honey-bearing flower of the buttercup family
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a fragrant honey-bearing flower of the buttercup family. This delightful flower is often called a honeysuckle, a shrubby plant to which it is not related. The American columbine blooms in May and June. The flowers grow on a woodland perennial herb two feet high. The five petals are, all alike, prolonged backward into straight honey-bearing spurs. The flowers are of a handsome delicate scarlet outside and yellow inside. They are pendant or nodding at first, but straighten up when they go to seed. The Rocky Mountain columbine has incurved spurs. It is blue or purplish, or even white. The garden columbine of Europe is the flower to which Jean Ingelow says: O Columbine ! open your folded wrapper, Where two twin turtle-doves dwell. The Scotch call these flowers "auld ladies' mutchie," or caps. Admirers of the columbine have urged its adoption as our national flower. They claim that the common name is derived from columba, a dove, the bird of peace; that it suggests Columbus, the discoverer of America; that its Latin name, aquilegia, is derived from the name of the eagle, the bird of America; that the flower would lend itself readily to artistic designs; that the shape of the flower suggests a liberty cap; and, finally, that the columbine is widely dispersed and universally beloved by children and all lovers of flowers. Our columbine is at all times and in all places one of the most exquisitely beautiful of flowers; yet one spring day, when I saw it growing out of a small seam on the face of a great lichen covered wall of rock, where no soil or mould was visible,--a jet of foliage and color shooting out of a black line on the face of a perpendicular mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain, its drops turning to flame-colored jewels that hung and danced in the air against the gray rocky surface,--its beauty became something magical and audacious.-Burroughs, Riverby.
Columbine a popular name for Aquilegia vulgaris or other species of the genus Aquilegia
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a popular name for Aquilegia vulgaris or other species of the genus Aquilegia. The common columbine has drooping purplish-blue flowers with five flat sepals; five petals, with long spurs, often curved; five follicles, the root-leaves twice or thrice ternate, the others singly ternate. The word is also applied to a female character in the Italian comedy, the "Daughter of Cassandra," and the mythic Harlequin, and to the female dancer in the English pantomime. COLUMBITE. A mineral containing iron, columbium, and usually manganese and tantalum. Its formula is commonly given as (Fe, Mn) (Cb, Ta)2O3. Occurs as brown or black in color; specific gravity opaque orthorhombic crystals, dark about 6.0. The mineral is found in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, North Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and in Norway, and is of interest because the element Columbium was first discovered in it by C. Hatchett, in 1802, the name being given because the mineral in which the metal was found came from America.
Columbine . See Harlequin
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
. See Harlequin
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The flower itself is much as Aiton's described it in 1910, and Aquilegia caerulea, the Rocky Mountain species with the incurved blue spurs, remains Colorado's state flower. The campaign these writers reported, to make the columbine the national flower on the grounds that its name recalls both the dove and Columbus, failed: Congress and President Reagan named the rose the national floral emblem in 1986. Collier's 1921 note on Columbine as the pantomime dancer opposite Harlequin now describes a dead tradition, and its neighbouring entry on columbite records an element, columbium, that IUPAC officially renamed niobium in 1949. For most English speakers today the word calls up neither flower nor pantomime but the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Written for this edition, 2026.