April 1899] THE CASE OF DOCTOR OTTO KUNTZE 297 



voted upon at Paris. It was considered that the frightful disorder 

 brought about by the neo-code would be a hundred times worse than 

 the evil which it pretended to remedy. In fact, from the uncertainty 

 on the subject of a relatively limited number of names, diminishing 

 year by year, thanks to the work of systematists, one falls into com- 

 plete disorder, into endless ambiguities, into quarrels over useless 

 names, and into envenomed polemics, all which things Article 3 of the 

 Principes dirigeants of the Laws counsel one to avoid as one avoids the 

 plague. It was noted, with satisfaction, that Alphonse de Candolle, 

 whose competence in nomenclature is at least worth that of Otto 

 Kuntze, disapproved of many of the theses of the innovator and declared 

 them inacceptable "avec des raisons claires et assez fortes pour que 

 chacun put les comprendre et les accepter." It was a case of much 

 ado about nothing. The great clamour raised around the Eevisio 

 gcnerum plantarwm gradually subsided ; systematists recovering from 

 their first stupor, once more resumed their labours, gleaning here and 

 there in the Kuntzean repertory a few names recognised as valid, and 

 passing the rest over to the archives. 



Otto Kuntze did not found a school. No marked and competent 

 botanist, not a group of monographers or systematists, either in the 

 Old World or in the New, adopted fully, freely, or without reserve his 

 rules and his innovations. The Eochester Code, which is the sole 

 direct and collective emanation of Kuntzeism, adopted only the most 

 unfortunate of his superfoetations on the Laws of 1867, nomina semi- 

 nuda, rejected everywhere else, and equally rejected by zoologists. The 

 scientific men who subscribed to the nine articles of the Eochester 

 Code (and they are nearly all the botanists of North America) rallied, 

 by way of revenge, round the starting-point of 1753, scouted by 

 Kuntze under the sobriquet of " initium ignorantium" and on several 

 other points set themselves in open opposition to their ex-master, who 

 spared them neither scratches nor epigrams. We learn to-day, from 

 Kuntze himself, that Article IV. of the Eochester Code (Homonyms) 

 and the principle of " Priority in place " will compel their authors to 

 change the names of 23,300 species. Kuntze, for his part, needing 

 not only more than 30,000, but more than ^0,500 changes, in great 

 part different from those of the-Eochesterians, the language of flowers 

 will offer this pretty spectacle : the names of the Americans will be 

 unintelligible to Otto Kuntze, and vice versa, whilst those botanists who 

 remain faithful to the Paris Code will have to search out the meaning 

 1 if about 60,000 schismatic and hieroglyphical species. Hash, chaos, 

 Babeldom — that, in seven years, must evidently be the result of the 

 shock given to systematic principles by the Rcvisio gencrum plantarum. 

 The indifference into which a pugnacious book falls being the worst of 

 deaths, Kuntze judged the moment had arrived to beat his tom-tom 

 again. An advertising pamphlet, with flattering notices on the last 

 page, attesting the excellence of his wares, was distributed urbi et orbi, 



