student making his work on orchidaceous genera known 
to Professor Linnaeus, we can also imagine the latter 
severely questioning the propriety of his taxonomic pro- 
cedure. Linnaeus could well have criticized him for 
ignoring the overall resemblance of his plants which 
justified keeping them together, for giving excessive 
importance to insignificant details and for revealing by 
his absurd breaking up of natural genera (although Ames 
in fact was more conservative in his approach than some 
of his contemporaries) a lack of understanding of the 
essentials in classification as then understood. 
Both professors would have been right within the con- 
text of their times. When the known species of a family 
are few, it is probably more convenient to keep them 
together within a few genera. When the same species 
have had added to them a host of others, it may be more 
convenient to divide them all among a much greater 
number of genera. Provided the facts about them are 
understood, it is often a matter of convenience or pre- 
vailing fashion or consistency of treatment in comparable 
situations, or even plain egotism, as to the taxonomic 
rank these groups should be assigned. 
The value of Linnaeus’s contributions to orchidology 
lies primarily not in his treating orchids as a special group 
but, on the contrary, in giving them the same nomen- 
clatural treatment as other plants in accordance with his 
methodology. The essentials of this were that: 
1) the genera should be named euphoniously and clear- 
ly, avoiding names which could be confused ; 
2) the generashould be defined according to a consistent 
formal plan, using a fixed terminology ; 
3) the species should be defined by key characters en- 
abling them to be distinguished and recognized ; 
4) the species should be given convenient binomial 
names. 
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