NOMENCLATURE OF BAYBKRRIES. 37 



has its nearest allies in certain species of the Virginian and 

 Carolinian mountains of the southern United States, which 

 have also, and without the slightest attention to their marked 

 characters, been named C. majalis. 



Nomenclature of the Bayberries. 



When in 1894 I wTote the Bay-Region Manual I declined 

 approval of that flagrant violation of fundamental principle by 

 which our bayberries, otherwise called wax myrtles, came to 

 be named as species of Myrica; for this name belongs of old 

 to the tamarisk tree, a type known as Taw^r/ji: in most I^atin- 

 written botany of to-day. During three thousand years or 

 more the name myrica recalled to every one w^ho read or heard 

 it nothing else but the tamarisk. It modern Greece the tree 

 is still myrica, and even in Italy w^hile in some provinces it is 

 known as tamarigio, in others it is still knowni by its Greek 

 name myrice. Neither Greeks nor Romans had any knowledge 

 of our bayberry bushes. 



It is little more than a century and a half since this senseless 

 transfer of the classic name of the tamarisk of Europe to our 

 American bayberries was proposed. I am justified in calling 

 it a senseless transfer ; for, at least, to those who know the 

 names of plants as they were anterior to 1753, to call wax 

 myrtles myrica species is no better than it would be to write 

 of oaks under the name of horse chestnuts ; and it is acting 

 just as absurdly as any zoologist w^ould be doing if, in writing 

 about camels, he should call them sheep ; for camels are camels 

 in whatsoever language one makes mention of them ; also sheep 

 are sheep whether taken note of under this our English desig- 

 nation of them, or that of oves of the Latins, probata of the 

 Greeks, or under any other name they bear in whatsoever 

 speech of men. To illustrate further this eighteenth-century 

 vice of the transference of generic names, I shall suppose that 

 lyinnaeus, who published our American genus of the raccoons 

 as merely a long-tailed sort of bears, had had the zoologic 



