329 
such conditions exist? Per contra, if we begin to reckon genera 
from some author, all, or very nearly all, of whose genera may 
be known by the preserved types, we at once dispel the preceding 
haze and remove at once a very grave difficulty. 
My friend next considers my statement that “ The ancients did 
not use the names in the generic sense of Tournefort, Linnzeus and 
others of about their time, but, in most cases at least, as mere 
appellations for plants.” Inasmuch as he admits “ the impossi- 
bility that the ancients should have applied names in the generic 
sense of any generation of modern botanists,” the only fact 
which I wished to emphasize by this sentence, it is hardly worth 
while to dwell on it longer. There is nothing init to imply that 
they never applied names as generic. But his remarks open up 
the very broad field of research into the history of the evolution 
of Systematic Botany, which he is so admirably equipped to dis- 
cuss, and about the details of which I am so ignorant. For, like 
everything else in the universe, the science has been produced by 
little and little. I suppose that primitive man, being brought as inti- 
mately as he was into contact with the vegetable kingdom, early 
came.to know such plants as were useful to him for food and 
clothing, and must have had names for them which were trans- 
mitted—doubtless with many modifications—from generation to 
generation. As the faculties of perception became developed, it 
became evident that there were relationships among the plants, 
and by a closer and closer study of these relationships the 
knowledge of the subject has increased to the present. The- 
ophrastus, Pliny and Dioscorides have, I know, been called the 
‘Fathers of Botany,” and in its broad sense the title is well 
given, but to my mind they are very far from being the Fathers 
of Systematic Botany. But if we consider other branches of 
human knowledge we find that it has not been found possible to 
push practical procedure therein back to anything like their be- 
ginnings. It has been found necessary to establish by common con- 
sent “statutes of limitation,” beyond which inquiry and speculation 
very freely go, but beyond which practical knowledge cannot be 
reached, and I believe it necessary in our science to establish a 
_ statute of limitations at a practical, available point, and this point 
I believe to be where the writings of some author who proposed 
