von. 11.) Mew American Rules of Nomenclature. 339 - 
PAROMALUs Consors Lec. Common; frequents decaying vegeta- 
ble matter. i 
SAPRINUS OREGONENSIS Lec.’ Common about fetid vegetable 
and animal matter. ’ 
SAPRINUS LUBRICUS Lec. and S. FRIMBRIATUS Lec. Abundant 
everywhere, especially along the seashore about putrefying matter. 
SAPRINUS CAERULESCENS Lec. Quite common in summer about 
the dead bodies of snakes and small mammals. 
SAPRINUS SULCIFRONS Lec. Common along the seashore be- 
neath kelp. 
VIEWS OF A WORKING BOTANIST ON THE NEW 
AMERICAN RULES OF .NOMENCLATURE. 
BY J. H. CONGDON. 
Five of these rules are simply the practice of all good botanists 
concisely expressed, and need no comment. No. VIII will never be 
followed. It is simply an extravagant but logical extension of the 
principle so rigidly expressed in rule No. t. 
The sooner No. 4 falls into a state of innocuous desuetude, the 
better. It will certainly get there. 
As for No. t, in the rigid construction that will be claimed for it, it 
is a deliberate sacrifice of the rights of the great majority of us to the 
vagaries of ‘ndividuals. Where all the botanists of a country have 
for a generation agreed on the use of certain names tor the vegeta- 
tion of their own country, and everyone has learned them and be- — 
‘come familiar with them, we do not intend to suffer some old pam- 
phlet to be dug up by some musing bookworm from some pile of 
forgotten rubbish in some back closet in some old library three thou- 
sand miles away, where some old pedant has given a vague descrip- 
tion from some traveler’s scrap of a plant which the author never saw 
growing and really knows nothing about, to make all the rest of us 
take up our botanical lists, which have become as familiar to us as 
our alphabet, and rub out the old names associated with years of 
study and observation in the field, and put in their miserable resuscl- 
‘tated antiquities. We shall do nothing of the kind. We shall stick 
to the old familiar words and leave the works of those that adopt 
these new-old names to repose in the antiquated dust from which 
- they were dug. 
