AN UNWRITTEN LAW 203 
lowed to bear, in its structure, any allusion to the man to whom 
the genus had been at first dedicated. An unwritten law against 
such a procedure was recognized; a law, one may say, of com- 
mon sense, common courtesy, good taste. 
The earliest instance of an apparently deliberate transgression 
of this unwritten law that I meet with so far, I find in Kunth’s 
Enumeratio, Volume V, published in 1550. There may be 
earlier cases, though I think not. At that date there had been 
already two genera dedicated to De Witt Clinton under the name 
Clintonia, one in 1817, the other in 1829, I need not here repeat 
the bibliography, for I gave it in the second volume of Pittonia 
more than sixteen years since. The author of the name, as it 
appeared in 1829, had no knowledge of the existence of the same 
as applied to another genus in 1817. His—the second C/intonia— 
was therefore but an accident; but in 1850, Kunth finding the 
1817 CZintonia valid, altered that of 1829 to Wittia, thus dedi- 
cating a second genus to De Witt Clinton. A few years later 
Dr. Torrey came to know this and promptly declined to make 
use of or give recognition to Kunth’s Wittia; but, though it 
had priority in its favor, he suppressed it, substituting Dow- 
ningta; and Downingia was at once adopted everywhere, both in 
America and in Europe, Wittia therefore hardly obtaining recog- 
nition asa synonym. This must have been Dr. Torrey’s first inti- 
mation that it could ever enter into the mind of a botanist to 
do such violence to one of the most fundamental principles of 
nomenclature; and his only passing comment on Kunth’s error is 
“It would be inadmissible to bestow two genera on the same 
person.’ It is possible, barely, that Kunth did not know that 
Rafinesque’s original C/intonia had been dedicated to the same 
Clinton; but that is unimportant. No one has ever admitted 
Wittia as a name, because, as Torrey said, that and the Cintonias 
are named for the same man. 
I do not know that any case like the above was again fur- 
nished until some forty years later; but from about the time of 
the appearing of Mr. Otto Kuntze’s Revisio this phase of degener- 
acy in nomenclature made a new beginning and has not yet met 
1Pacific Railway Report, iv. 116 (1857). 
