VOL. III.] Nezv American Rules of Nomenclature. 339 



Paromalus CONSORS Lec. Common; frequents decaying vegeta- 

 ble matter. 



Saprinus oregonensis Lec. Common about fetid vegetable 

 and animal matter. 



Saprinus lubricus Lec. and S. frimbriatus Lec. Abundant 

 everywhere, especially along the seashore about putrefying matter. 



Saprinus cerulescens Lec. Quite common in summer about 

 the dead bodies of snakes and small mammals. 



Saprinus sulcifrons Lec. Common along the seashore be- 

 neath kelp. 



VIEWS OF A WORKING BOTANIST ON THE NEW 

 AMERICAN RULES OF NOMENCLATURE. 



BY J. H. CONGDON. 



Five of these rules are simply the practice of all good botanists 

 concisely expressed, and need no comment. No. VIII will never be 

 followed. It is simply an extravagant but logical extension of the 

 "principle so rigidly expressed in rule No. i. 



The sooner No. 4 falls into a state of innocuous desuetude, the 

 better. It will certainly get there. 



As for No. I, in the rigid construction that will be claimed for it, it 

 is a deliberate sacrifice of the rights of the great majority of us to the 

 vagaries of individuals. Where all the botanists of a country have 

 for a generation agreed on the use of certain names for the vegeta- 

 tion of their own country, and everyone has learned them and be- 

 come familiar with them, we do not intend to suffer some old pam- 

 phlet to be dug up by some musing bookworm from some pile of 

 forgotten rubbish in some back closet in some old library three thou- 

 sand miles away, where some old pedant has given a vague descrip- 

 tion from some traveler's scrap of a plant which the author never saw 

 growing and really knows nothing about, to make all the rest of us 

 take up our botanical lists, which have become as familiar to us as 

 our alphabet, and rub out the old names associated with years of 

 study and observation in the field, and put in their miserable resusci- 

 tated antiquities. We shall do nothing of the kind. We shall stick 

 to the old familiar words and leave the works of those that adopt 

 these new-old names to repose in the antiquated dust from which 

 they were dug. 



