mained unstudied, and in 1884 he devoted his attention to them. 

 For six years he worked at this task, and in the solution of the 

 problems that came up in connection with it. The years 1884 

 to 1887 were spent at Berlin, with a visit to eastern Asiatic Rus- 

 sia in 1886; during the winter of 1887-88 there was a brief vaca- 

 tion in the Canary Islands, and the years 1888 to 1890 were spent 

 at Kew, England, the greatest botanical establishment in the 

 world, where the vast undertaking was completed. 



Nomenclature, that nightmare of natural science, was par- 

 ticularlj'' troublesome to botanists at about this period. Desir- 

 ous of assigning to his plants the names they ought to bear, 

 yet finding botanical nomenclature in what appeared to him a 

 very unsatisfactory condition, he prepared for his own guidance 

 a very elaborate and detailed code of nomenclature, and revised 

 in accordance with this code the names not only of the plants he 

 had himself collected, but of all other plants which seemed to 

 him to be masquerading under "wrong" names. As he pro- 

 ceeded, therefore, his work expanded from a mere list of the 

 plants he had collected, with descriptions of the novelties, until 

 it was virtually a revision of the names of all known flowering 

 plants, and when the two large volumes appeared, in 1891, they 

 bore the appropriate title "Revisio generum plantarum." 



The zeal of the reformer over-reached itself. The deliberate 

 proposal to alter some 25,000 plant names made botanists every- 

 where gasp (figuratively, at least), and made quite impossible 

 the general acceptance of Kuntze's code, however carefully he 

 had elaborated it, and however reasonable it might have ap- 

 peared if he had not emphasized its consequences. In fact, 

 reasonable reform of botanical nomenclature has not even yet 

 fully recovered from the blow given it by the publication of 

 Kuntze's Revisio more than twenty years ago. 



On the 11th of November, 1891, about a week after the pub- 

 lication of his monumental work, Kuntze sailed from Hamburg 

 for South America, for a much needed vacation, and arrived in 

 Montevideo on the 7th of December. He spent the whole of 

 the following year collecting in the Argentine Republic, Chile, 

 Bolivia, Paraguay, and southern Brazil, and upon his return 

 arrived at Berlin January 3, 1893. He spent the next few months 

 in preparing for publication the first part of a third volume of 

 his Revisio, which was devoted wholly to a detailed discussion 

 of everything relating to botanical nomenclature that had ap- 

 peared since the first two volumes were issued. 



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