INTRODUCTION. 39 



protest against one-man authority, no matter how great 

 that man might be, and after all the laudation of the democ- 

 racy of the botanists, — that the real democracy, in which 

 every botanist has a vote, should now be dictated to by a 

 comparatively few botanists of various degrees of repute. 

 History testifies that power and dictation are fully as 

 sweet to thirty tyrants as to one! The matter practi- 

 cally wears this aspect in our opinion, since we have been 

 unable to find more than passive approval of the Code 

 outside of a comparatively small circle of botanists, and in 

 many cases have found active disapproval or a decided 

 disclaimer of any sympathy with the Code where we 

 hardly expected it. We sincerely hope that botanists 

 in other countries will not be deceived into thinking that 

 this school of nomenclature includes the American bota- 

 nists, for it includes only a part, even if it is the part that 

 makes most of the noise ! 



Another evil produced by the adoption of this Code is 

 the great prominence given to the botanical name-monger, 

 a term which we use for convenience to denote those 

 botanists who devote much of their time to changing 

 about names of plants for no scientific reason, but merely 

 to fit them to a code. To the binomial thus manufactured 

 they add their names, and stand apparently on a par with 

 botanists whose names attached as authors stand for true 

 scientific achievement. The addition in parentheses of 

 the name of the original author of the specific name does 

 not help the matter much in such cases, for it does not 

 explain the binomial. There are, moreover, no indica- 

 tions at present that there is likely to be such a consensus 

 of agreement in the names of plants as might enable us 

 to omit the name of the author altogether. Thanks to 

 the provincial-mindedness of the so-called reformers, we 



