REFORM OF LINNJSUS. 393 



ra, intended to secure convenience or elegance. For instance, that 

 they are to be single words; 6 he substitutes alropa, for bella donna, 

 and leontodon for dens leonis ; that they are not to depend upon the 

 name of another genus, 8 as acriviola, agrimonoidcs ; that they are not' 

 to be " sesquipedalia ;" and, says he, any word is sesquipedalian to rue, 

 which has more than twelve letters, as kalophyllodendron, for which 

 he substitutes calophyllon. Though some of these rules may seem 

 pedantic, there is no doubt that, taken altogether, they tend exceed- 

 ingly, like the labors of purists in other languages, to exclude extrava- 

 gance, caprice, and barbarism in botanical speech. 



The precepts which he gives for the matter of the " descriptive 

 phrase," or, as it is termed in the language of the Aristotelian logi- 

 cians, the " differentia," are, for the most part, results of the general 

 rule, that the most fixed characters which can be found are to be 

 used ; this rule being interpreted according to all the knowledge of 

 plants which had then been acquired. The language of the rules was, 

 of course, to be regulated by the terminology, of which we have 

 already spoken. 



Thus, in the Critica Botanica, the name of a plant is considered as 

 consisting of a generic word and a specific phrase ; and these are, he 

 says, 8 the right and left hands of the plant. But he then speaks of 

 another kind of name ; the trivial name, which is opposed to the 

 scientific. Such names were, he says, 8 those of his predecessors, and 

 especially of the most ancient of them. Hitherto 10 no rules had been 

 given for their use. He manifestly, at this period, has small regard 

 for them. " Yet," he says, " trivial names may, perhaps, be used on 

 this account, that the differentia often turns out too long to be con- 

 venient in common use, and may require change as new species are 

 discovered. However," he continues, " in this work we set such 

 names aside altogether^ and attend only to the differentiae" 



Even in the Species Plantarum, the work which gave general cur- 

 rency to these trivial names, he does not seem to have yet dared to 

 propose so great a novelty. They only stand in the margin of the 

 work. " I have placed them there," he says in his Preface, " that, 

 without circumlocution, we may call every herb by a single name ; I 

 have done this without selection, which would require more time. 

 A.nd I beseech all sane botanists to avoid most religiously ever pro- 



6 Phil. Sot. 224. 6 Ib. 228, 229. T Ib. 252. 



8 Ib. 2*>. 9 Ib. 261. 10 Ib. 260. 



