38 LKAFLEITS. 



common sense to see that they were not bears, but of a distinct 

 genus, and the genus in need of a name as such. Now Urstis, 

 the Latin name of bear, being securely in place for the true 

 bears, it would have been exactly like Linnaeus if he had 

 picked up the Greek name for bears, which is Ardos, and had 

 applied that as the scientific designation of those New World 

 mammals, the raccoons. Thus, while to illiterate dabblers in 

 zoolog3^ Ardos would have been a good enough generic name 

 for our raccoons as distinct from the genus bear, still, to 

 Greeks — yes, and to educated Romans as well, for they know 

 Greek — Linnaeus would still be calling raccoons bears. 



This hypothetic Linnaean transfer of the Greek name of bear 

 to the raccoon is not an exact parallel to his transfer of Myrica 

 to the bayberries ; for it is confessed that raccoons and bears 

 are not, after all, so very far apart taxonomically, while no one 

 has ever pretended that tamarix and bayberry are closely 

 akin. They are wide apart; so that such perversion of the 

 name Myrica is, if possible, worse than it would have been to 

 have applied the Greek for bear to the raccoon genus. No 

 Greek of to-day, if, unacquainted with Linnaean tricks of 

 nomenclature, he should open one of the Linnaean books at a 

 Myrica page could at first glance have any idea that tamarix 

 was not meant ; and such Greek w^ould be amply justified in 

 his act, if he should throw the book into a corner as a piece of 

 pretentious nonsense, after having discovered by reading the 

 diagnosis, that some genus which Greeks never knew, had 

 been designated by this their classic name for trees that had 

 been known as myricas for some thousands of years. 



In that book of mine which I have mentioned above, I en- 

 tered one protest at least, against this abuse— this perverted 

 use — of Greek generic names, and restored for the Californian 

 species of bayberry the name Gale, which Tournefort had 

 adopted in the year 1694 when the recognition of the genus 

 was new, and it had become certain that, the ancients not 

 having known the shrub, it had neither a Greek nor a Latin 

 name. I called the fine large Californian bayberry tree Gale 

 Calif ornica (Man. p. 298). 



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