40 
On Legitimate Authorship of Certain Binomials with Other Notes 
on Nomenclature. 
By Geo. B. SUDWORTH. 
Among our North American trees are several species which 
bear names the authors of which custom, or a desire not to of- 
fend the memory of faithful explorers and collectors, has long held 
to be legitimate. In other words we have on record and in com- 
mon use, names attributed to authors, who, although knowing 
them thoroughly, never described the species to which they ap- 
plied the name. Many such designations appear for the first time 
as bare catalogue names or in narratives, and have been taken up 
and ascribed to their originators in some cases with small ground 
for knowing to what plant the writer applied the name. Closely re- 
lated to this class of names are those with general notes or re- 
marks on plant features possessed by several species in common, 
and rendering it exceedingly unsafe to judge of what species the 
author had in hand. Plant descriptions are highly unsatisfactory 
and uncertain (without figures) when most carefully drawn, especi- 
ally with variable and closely related forms; but still less tenable 
are names founded upon no attempted description and upon such 
running remarks as “used for a yellow dye;” “a beautiful pine ;” 
“a tall tree.” 
A few European collectors named our plants in the field, send- 
ing their specimens to home herbaria where on examination in a 
single place one might on seeing the plant with its appended label 
know what species the collector met, but which in the first pub- 
lished account of his journey is mentioned only by name. Fol- 
lowing such lack of published data, painstaking botanists have 
later figured and described the same species, taking up, with the 
discoverer as the authority, the originally applied name. But > : 
who, in such cases, is the one responsible to the world of botanists 
at large for the validity of the name? Presumably, and in ac- 
cordance with the requirements.of properly publishing a species, 
the discoverer is not; for the botanists at large who cannot ex- 
amine the original specimen, kept in a single herbarium, would 
never have known what manner of plant was meant, except from 
the one who described it and published it in some circulating : 
