OF THE GENUS BUEFONIA. 185 



whom the genus was dedicated. Had Sauvages written "Buffonia, 

 he would have remarked that Linnaeus, in his letter of the 15th of 

 October 1745, had mis-spelt the name, and Linnaeus, thus warned, 

 would have rectified it in his letter of the 20th of August 1747. 

 Not only is this not done, but we shall see that the Montpellier 

 botanist himself gives an official consecration to the error, in 

 complete disagreement with the etymology. 



The ' Methodus Foliorum, seu Plantae Florae Monspeliensis,' 

 a remarkably curious work, published at the Hague in 1751, gives 

 the generic characters of Buffonia, followed at p. 141 by these 

 words, " dicata illustrissimo Horti Eegii Parisiensis Praefecto, et 

 Acad. Eegiae Scient. Paris. Sodali D. de Buffon;" and by a sin- 

 gularity not easily to be accounted for, Sauvages prints, or allows 

 to b)e printed, Bufonia in his text, while in the index he places 

 Buffonia, without indicating that it is the correction of a mistake. 

 More than this, after the generic name he adds an X., as if Lin- 

 naeus were the founder of the genus. '' Thus we have a justification 

 for those botanists who attribute the genus Buffonia to Linnaeus ; 

 and thus we can explain how it has happened that Linnaeus, in 

 the " legal " edition of his ' Species Plantarum,' 1764, Lamarck in 

 1783, in the first volume of the ' Encyclopedie Methodique,' 

 Gaertner in 1787, in his work *De Eructibus*,' Jussieu in his 

 * Genera Plantarum,' 1789, and a multitude of other authors, have 

 written the name Bufonia, in submission to the text of Sauvages 

 •and to that of the ' Amoenitates.' 



It evidently results victoriously from the preceding exposition 

 that the alteration of the generic name Buffonia^ by the sup- 

 pression of one of the/' s, cannot be in any respect attributed to 

 Linnaeus, but to Sauvages himself, and thus are annihilated all 

 assertions to the contrary, made in a multitude of books, which 

 have found credulous readers, who perhaps were not displeased to 

 discover in a great man, in spite of their esteem for him, what 

 they regarded as a weakness.. Nevertheless, to render the justi- 

 fication, if possible, still more complete, let us admit for an instant 

 that Linnaeus was desirous of making an unworthy approximation 

 between an illustrious adversary and a filthy animal. Every action 

 having an object, let us ask ourselves what could be Linnaeus's 

 object in so doing? "He wished," it maybe said, "to avenge 

 himself on Buftbn, who had combated his ideas of reform." 

 Who can think thus of a man, who up to that time was ignorant 

 even of the name of his future adversary, occupied till then only 



* Gaertner, it should be observed, spells the name with the double Jf, quoting 

 " Bufonia, L." as a synonym. — J. J. B. 



