VOL. IV.] Notes from the Gray Herbarium. 379 



facture species which other men have sent them at great expense 

 of health, time and money. The hardships of field collectors 

 are very great and so far as I know not a single man has made 

 anything more out of it than a poor living to say nothing of 

 profit, and when such a man names a species after having studied it 

 in the field and then sends it on to some authority in the East with 

 its name, and in order not to have a rupture with that authority 

 lets him publish it for him, it is an outrage to rob the field 

 botanist because he did not actually pay for the printing or write 

 the words attached to it. If we are to go behind the printing 

 as some would have us do and attach not the name of the real 

 author of the species but the one who ostensibly published it, 

 then another question would arise as to whether the words 

 credited to the man who published the species were actually 

 written by him or some clerk in his office, in that case the clerk 

 should have the honor of the name. But what will be the result 

 of such an innovation ? Douglas' species will all be taken from 

 him, Nuttall's are in the same condition, though they are put in 

 quotation marks he never published them, but Torrey and Gray 

 did. It seems to me that these notions of nomenclature are 

 becoming more and more technical and equally unjust and will 

 not be accepted by the majority of botanists who want to see 

 due credit given to those who have earned it by their labor. We 

 are losing the meat of nomenclature in the rubbish of formalism. 

 No ex parte rules adopted by a few botanists will ever secure 

 uniformity in American botany, nor will any rules stand long 

 which ignore the rights of collectors. 



NOTES FROM THE GRAY HERBARIUM. 



BY M. I^. FERNALD. 



f Habenaria luc.^CAPensis, n. sp. A foot and a half high, 



leafy; principal root tuber-like, an inch long, with numerous 

 accessory fibres from the summit: leaves thin, broadly elliptical, 

 obtusish, four inches long, half as broad, rather abruptly nar- 

 rowed to a sheathing base; the lowest smaller, orbicular; the upper 

 reduced to lanceolate acuminate bracts, an inch in length: raceme 



February 26, 1894. 



