448 CORRESPONDENCE. [1858, 



view curious facts of distribution, etc., and lay out a 

 set for the Kew herbarium. How true it is, as you 

 intimated, that the interchange in northern hemi- 

 sphere has mainly been via Asia. 



I heartily admire your "Handbook," and await with 

 great interest your paper growing out of it ; your 

 experience is so great and your judgment so sound. 

 As to English nomenclature, we can only approxi- 

 mate to a good system ; the practical difficulties are 

 too great, often insurmountable. It seems to me you 

 hit the happy medium, if we must needs have popular 

 name of the genus coextensive with the Latin one ; 

 but I rather doubt the advisability of that, and would 

 use sub-generic popular names for generic, I think. 

 Though " I do not much like " the whole thing, yet 

 somebody must attend to English nomenclature, for 

 better or worse ; so I am glad you took it up. 



I hope you will study perigynous and epigynous. 

 As to ovar}^, which, putting the important part for 

 the whole, we have learned to use in place of pistil, it 

 certainly is perfectly novel to me to hear the name 

 applied to the gyna3cium of Ranunculus. I am confi- 

 dent the word is never so used in De Candolle or 

 Endlicher. I do not recall any instance of your using 

 the word in any such sense ; I am sure I never did. 

 Where the fact of the combination is doubtful or am- 

 biguous, if I said ovary, that would infer the combi- 

 nation ; if ovaries, the distinctness. In Apocynacea3 

 A. De Candolle steadily writes ovarium or ovaria, 

 according to the nature of the case. Per contra, you 

 mi^ht as well call the column of Malva a stamen ! For 



o 



the collective term, I wish, in your paper, you would go 

 for restoring to use the Linnaean term pistillum, and 

 against the habit of using ovarium in a double sense, 



