368 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Sept. 



Either of these modes is simple and easily understood, and 

 neither of them involves much confusion in nomenclature. But 

 of late years many botanists have adopted a rule different from 

 both, and have attempted to give to it the force of law, whereby 

 any author who first removes a 'well described species of another 

 author into a different and previously described genus, or even 

 into the same genus under a different name, is thereby entitled to 

 connect his own name with it to the exclusion of that of the 

 original author both of the genus and of the species. Thus 

 Robert Brown, in the catalogue cited above, having occasion to 

 include P. fragnms, wrote one line thus, " 440. Ncphrodium 

 fragrans, Aspidium fragrans Willd., v., p. 25.3,'' and thereby 

 became entitled to have his name associated with this plant when 

 any subsequent writer called it a. Nephrodium, to the exclusion of 

 both Linn^ and Richard.* A more absurd instance is furnished 

 by another well-known North American fern, the Nephrodium 

 punctilobnlum of Michaux (anno 1803). In 1788 L'Heritier 

 founded the well-characterized genus Dicksonia before Michaux's 

 species was known ; about 1809 Schkuhr figured and described 

 the plant, under its proper genus, as Dicksonia puhescens, a 

 characteristic name; in 1846 Sir Wm. Hooker re-described it in 

 Species Filicum as " D. punctiloha Hook." restoring but mis- 

 spelling Michaux's name ; in 1848 Prof. Kunzd contributed to 

 SiUimans Journal, a paper " on some Ferns of the United 

 States," in which he says, in correction, " I refer, with Hooker, 

 this plant again to Dicksonia, and name it D. punctilohula,'" — -in 

 reward for which intellectual effort most United States botanists 

 now write D. punctilobula Kiinze ! 



Nor is it always easy to find out who was the first author to 

 do such signal service to botanical science as to move a plant 

 from one established genus to another, to restore an older specific 

 name, or to correct a lapsus pennae. Even the careful Gray 

 makes slips, and writes his own name after some species in 

 violation of his own " law." A remarkable instance of this occurs 

 in the case of Aspidium spinulosum var. dilatatum Gray, the 



* It is true that several years before this author wrote some able 

 papers on Fern Genera, but that circumstance does not aifect the case 

 as now put. It is somewhat singular too that this credit is generally 

 denied to Brown ; Sir Wm. Hooker, Mr. Baker, and other authors, always 

 write Nephrodium fragrans Richardson, although the latter gave full 

 credit to Brown for his share of their joint work. 



