Mullein
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Mullein. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
mul'lin, in botany, a genus of the Scrophularia family. It is related to the snapdragon, "butter and eggs," monkey flower, gerardia, and painted cup. There are four species in America. All are immigrants from Europe. The common mullein is a tall, stout, coarse, woolly weed. The stem is unbranched, and grows often as tall as a man. It is crowded with heavy, densely woolly leaves. The bases run down the stem, giving it an angled appearance. The stem terminates in a spike of sessile, yellow, irregular flowers. It is a common plant in old fields and by the wayside. Grown from the seed, a rosette of leaves is produced the first year. The flowering stalk shoots up the second season. After going to seed the plant dies. Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster--plants, eight, ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy in the morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The farmers, I find, think the mullein a mean, unworthy weed, but I have grown to a fondness for it.--Walt Whitman.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the common English name for the plant Verbascum Thapsus, natural order Scrophulariaceæ. The common mullein grows in old fields, roadsides, etc., and is a tall rough plant. The flowers are yellow, almost sessile, and are disposed in a long, cylindrical spike. MÜLLER, FRIEDRICH, called PAINT- ER MÜLLER, a German painter and dramatist; born in Kreuznach, Prussia, Jan. 13, 1749. His first interest was in art and in 1778 he went to Rome to study painting, but his pictures were unsuccessful. He wrote: "Bacchido and Milo" (1775); "The Satyr Mopsus" (1775); "Adam's First Awaking and First Happy Nights" (1778); the dramas "Genoveva" (1808); "Life of Faust" (latest ed. 1881); the opera "Niobe" (1778); etc. ("Works," new ed., Heidelberg, 1825.) He died in Rome, April 23, 1825. MÜLLER, FRIEDRICH MAX, a German philologist; born in Dessau, Germany, Dec. 6, 1823; son of Wilhelm Müller, the German poet; was educated at the Universities of Berlin and Leipsic; removed to England in 1846; and was Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford in 1868-1875. He was the editor or translator of "Hitothe "Rig-Vedas" (6 padesa" ); vols. 1849-1874); etc., and the author of sa" (1844); "A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature" (1859); "Lectures on the Science of Languages" (1861-1864); "Chips from a German Workshop" (1868-1875); "Lectures on the Science of Religion" (1870); etc. He died in Oxford, England, Oct. 28, 1900.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The botany here still holds: the plant Collier's named in 1921, Verbascum thapsus, is still Verbascum thapsus, still a biennial European immigrant that makes a woolly rosette one year and a spike of yellow flowers the next. What has moved is the company it keeps. DNA-based classification since the 1990s broke up the old Scrophulariaceae, and while mullein stayed in it, every relative Aiton's listed in 1910 was moved out: snapdragon and butter-and-eggs to Plantaginaceae, monkey flower to Phrymaceae, gerardia and painted cup to the parasitic Orobanchaceae. The farmers' view that Aiton's reported has also hardened in places, with common mullein now listed as a noxious weed in some western US states, though Whitman's fondness survives in its steady sale as a herbal tea and cough remedy.
Written for this edition, 2026.