514 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Botany in 1875 in English was the first intimation to many of us 

 that we had been grossly defrauded in our college course and fed 

 on the gray husks of the subject. 



Following the death of Gray, there was also a concerted move- 

 ment towards a rational system of nomenclature for American plants, 

 following the practise of zoologists in certain points, and finally result- 

 ing in more fundamental methods of fixing the types of genera. The 

 first effort leading towards unification was expressed in the so-called 

 ' Eochester Eules ' evolved after practically an all-night session of a 

 committee at the Eochester meeting of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science in 1892 and passed by a practically 

 unanimous vote the following day. These were modified the follow- 

 ing year at the Madison meeting and some unfortunate minor details 

 were introduced that brought about considerable antagonism. This 

 opposition naturally attracted to itself a considerable contingent of 

 morphological and physiological botanists who knew practically noth- 

 ing about the subject, and never took the trouble to learn, beyond the 

 fact that it produced some change in the use of names with which 

 they had become familiar. Subsequently the necessity for the fixation 

 of generic types 1 became apparent as more serious study of the whole 

 subject advanced, and new features were introduced into what is now 

 known as the ' American Code of Nomenclature.' The mutual con- 

 cessions at the Vienna Congress of 1905 resulted in removing the most 

 objectionable features of the propositions of both parties in the con- 

 troversy, and in bringing about practical unanimity on this side of the 

 water. Old beliefs die hard, however, and the region beyond the Eiver 

 Charles appears to be an appropriate place for beliefs to die. The 

 doctrine of fiat creation as opposed to the doctrine of evolution died 

 there a royal death with Louis Agassiz in 1873 ; and after two vigorous 

 antemortem utterances on the subject by the generations past, the 

 Kew rule, the last vestige of personal as opposed to rational usage 

 in plant nomenclature, has recently stalked off the platform, and is 

 now, so far as America is concerned, a thing of the dead past. 



It is interesting to note the effects of political history on a sub- 

 ject so seemingly remote as botany. Before the Franco-Prussian war 

 of 1870, German was almost unknown in our college courses except as 

 an unusual elective. French was then considered the one necessary 

 modern language. The unification of Germany changed all this, and 

 the German language at once took its proper place in our system of 



1 At the present time the zoologists of America are struggling over this 

 problem of generic types, and ideas of what the principle really means are 

 actually penetrating the German mind, slower in grasping the real significance 

 of this problem. When this principle once takes root among the botanical 

 workers on the continent, not even the ' railroading ' methods of the Vienna Con- 

 gress will be able to stem the tide of real progress. 



