THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 107 



selected the nomenclature of Bailey's "Cyclopedia of Horti- 

 culture" as a sort of standard and have issued a list of the 

 names it is proposed to use together with others by which 

 the plants are known. When the 7th edition of Gray's 

 Manual appeared, the editor of this magazine suggested 

 that the names in the Manual be taken as the standard 

 names of our eastern American plants, but the promoters 

 of that work did not appreciate the advantage this would 

 have been to American botany, and as soon as the book was 

 published began enthusiastically to curtail its usefulness by 

 making a lot of additional changes in the names. When we 

 began studying botany we assumed that the names of plants 

 were applied to them to render mention of them intelligible 

 to others, and it took us a long while to discover that the 

 chief purpose of giving a name to a plant was to see if any- 

 body could dig up an earlier name to supplant it. The 

 labors of these seekers after "priority" always remind us 

 of a bunch of small boys playing "duck on a rock", in which 

 game the object is always to knock the other fellow's duck 

 off the rock. The names in the new code are often arbit- 

 rarily selected, but if those most interested will unite in us- 

 ing them we shall soon have one stable brand of nomen- 

 clature in America at least. This magazine proposes to 

 follow the list in mentioning cultivated plants hereafter 

 and the editor believes others will find it desirable to do 

 likewise. 



-T* *r^ *T* 



The list of edible wild plants promised for this number 

 has proven to be a somewhat larger undertaking than it at 

 first appeared and its publication is therefore deferred until 

 a later number. Meanwhile, further notes regarding plants 

 to be included in the list are invited. It will probably be 

 necessary to publish a preliminary list in order to call out 

 notes from many observers. 



