445 
volumes. The paper closes with a proposed list of international 
symbols for briefly designating various features of plants and with 
a summary of the principles of nomenclature which he thinks 
should now be adopted, consisting of seventy-five articles printed 
in German, English and French. 
That Dr. Kuntze’s contributions to the science of plant nomen- 
clature have been the most valuable, the most voluminous and the 
most important ever made goes without saying. Their results 
however prove conclusively to our mind that uniform international 
agreement on all poinis is unattainable by the recommendations 
of congresses or persons to which the whole botanical world is 
expected to fully assent. We believe that uniform usage can be 
secured, however, by the adoption of a series of simple principles, 
supplementary to and explanatory of the Paris Code of 1867, by 
a national group of botanists’ who will carry them out to the letter 
to the best of their knowledge and allow no exceptions whatever 
to interfere. This is what the North American botanists have 
well begun by the legislation effected at the Rochester and Madi- 
son meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, and the preparation and printing of the catalogue of fern 
and flowering plants of Northeastern America there authorized, 
based on these principles, which is now in press. 
We are more fortunate than our European brethren, inasmuch 
as we have no very great amount of inertia to overcome, and we 
have the instructive example of the previous work in just the same 
line by our ornithological colleagues, whose principles are re- 
ceiving wider and wider adhesion, and who have not deviated one 
iota from their rules adopted some seven years ago. Bickerings 
over nomenclature are practically a thing of the past among our 
students of the feathered race. We believe that this millenium 
has arrived for our botanists. That errors will now and then be 
made in the readjustment of names is a necessary accompaniment 
of the conditions, but they can readily be corrected. 
And this is the movement which the learned editor of the 
“ Journal of Botany ” facetiously and somewhat wrathfully alludes 
to as “the neo-American epidemic.” Well, epidemics do a great 
deal of good, we believe, in the elimination of the weak and facili- 
tating the survival of the fittest, and as to his compound adjective 
