AN UNWRITTEN LAW. 201 
An Unwritten Law of Nomenclature. 
In the process of genus-naming, whether in relation to ani- 
mals or plants, there are possible courses of action not a few 
that are in various degrees open to objection as leading to the 
introduction of names more or less offensive and repugnant to 
good taste. Many names of that character had become estab- 
lished in earlier and later pre-Linnaean botany; so many that, 
with the steady advance in literary learning and mental refine- 
ment, early in the eighteenth eentury Linnaeus seems to have 
felt that the time was ripe for a reform of nomenclature in this 
particular. There existed then, as there has always existed, 
and most naturally, a deep sense of the right of priority in 
nomenclature; but such appears to have been the degree of 
dissatisfaction felt with a host of generic names then in vogue, 
that Linnaeus’ rules published as code in the Philosophia 
Botanica led at once to the suppression of a long list of dis- 
tasteful names despite their being under the supposed protection 
of the law of priority. Such expurgation of generic nomencla- 
ture as was then made could never have been effected through 
the mere will of one individual reformer. Botanists in general, 
as men of culture, must have been already more or less disgusted 
with the superabundance of cheaply and easily made names 
that were current in all the books, and upon the tongues of all 
teachers of our science. Let any one who will, look for himself 
into the indexes of genera found in the excellent volumes of 
Ray, Tournefort, Vaillant, Boerhaave and others of the most 
celebrated among the immediate precursors of the Swedish 
reformer. There are I think hardly fewer than a hundred 
names formed by the mere adding of ofdes at the end of the 
generic name to make a new one for some different genus. 
Carex, for example, was Cyperoides, Oxytropis was Astragaloides, 
one rosaceous Pentaphyllum, and next after it Pentaphylloides, 
this indistinctive undignified onomatology—ready-made, so to 
speak; for the most illiterate pretender to anything approach- 
ing botany could by this cheap trick make a hundred or two of 
LEAFLETS OF BoTANICAL OBSERVATION AND CRITICISM, Vol. I pp 
201-212, April 10, 1906. 
