1918] Blake,— Notes on the Clayton Herbarium 23 
no means so clear or so significant in its application to prelinnaean 
synonymy as it has been found to be in the case of modern binomials, 
and should not be too hastily resorted to. When a prelinnaean poly- 
nomial has been wholly or largely adopted by Linnaeus for his diag- 
nostic phrase (the “nomen specificum” of Linnaeus, whose “nomen 
triviale” has become our modern “specific name”), the plant so 
honored should certainly be considered as entitled to the restricted 
Linnaean name, unless some valid objection to this course can be 
presented. In many and perhaps most cases, however, the applica- 
tion of Linnaean names must be determined by the action of sub- 
sequent authors, and here choice must be made between two courses, 
different in their methods but sometimes leading to the same end. 
By what may be called the process of unconscious elimination,— 
through the creation of new specific names for units involved in a 
given Linnaean species by subsequent authors, without reference to 
or (so far as is shown by published notice) knowledge of their con- 
nection with that Linnaean species,— the latter may eventually be 
reduced to a single entity to which the name might be restricted. 
On the other hand, an author with a knowledge of the several entities 
constituting a Linnaean species as originally described may, even 
after the more or less complete dissection of a Linnaean species in the 
manner just described, restrict it to some one of its original compo- 
nents, perhaps already named, and assign a new name to that portion 
of it to which, by the first method of procedure, the Linnaean name 
would be restricted. This second method, which by the way is the 
one now adopted by ornithologists for the determination of generic 
types, seems the soundest that can be adopted. It is scarcely neces- 
sary to add that such further use of this power of subsequent designa- 
tion of the type as may be necessary should not be arbitrary, but 
should where possible incorporate the established work of previous 
authors who have not been guided by this principle. 
1. Scirpus capitatus L. Sp. i. 48 (1753). From the subjoined 
Linnaean diagnosis it will be seen that this species was based almost 
entirely on the Gronovian reference, which in turn is based on Clayton 
380, now in the British Museum. ‘This specimen is the plant now 
1 Scirpus capitatus. 
“5. SCIRPUS culmo tereti nudo setiformi, spica subglobosa. 
“Scirpus culmo setaceo nudo, spica subglobosa. Gron. virg. 12. 
“ Habitat in Virginia.” 
