321 
It may be said to embody four rules or principles which are 
opposed to those adopted by the Botanical Club of the American 
Association. These, which may for convenience be designated 
the Harvard rules, afford a good opportunity for the comparison 
of the two codes, which every botanist should make for himself 
deliberately and judicially. It seems eminently desirable that 
those who have not yet given thought to the subject should un- 
derstand the full significance of the problem with which the As- 
sociation botanists have been dealing. The first of them, that 
relative to ordinal names, it is unnecessary to discuss from the 
standpoint of the new nomenclature, for no official action on this 
matter has as yet been taken by the botanical club committee. 
The Harvard rules are promulgated after a distinct statement 
of belief* that no stability in nomenclature is possible, and that 
the decision as to what names shall be used for genera is to be 
left to the judgment of individual botanists and not decided by 
the principle of priority.+ 
These rules represent the system which for many decades 
botanists all over the world have been trying to escape, a system 
which renders the nomenclature of a book thirty or forty years 
old largely unintelligible, except to the systematist, and which 
gives every promise of repeating its own history. It is preémi- 
nently a /azssez faire system, and the most that can be claimed for 
it is that it has served « fairly well.” .If at the beginning of the 
present century botanists had adopted a system based on priority, 
how great would be our obligation to them! Instead of a hun- 
dred years of heterogeneous and largely unrecognizable names, we 
should have had a botanical literature in which a plant would al- 
ways have had the same name, and ready intelligibility of this lit- 
erature would be possible to every reader. The botanists of the 
next century will not, it is hoped, have such a hundred years of 
constant change to look back upon as we in our time have had. 
Some botanists are prone to pin their faith to the arbitrary 
authority of a standard book, and are holding up that truly mag- 
nificent work, the Index Kewensis, now nearly completed, as the 
safe and only guide in nomenclature. But history shows that the 
* Robinson, Botanical Gazette, 20: 103. Ap. 1895. 
+ Harvard Rules, No. 2 (May, 1895). 
