22 American nomenclatuIvE. 



years by the authority of the greatest botanists. Further comment 

 is unnecessary. 



It has, moreover, been asked, with some pertinence, What 

 authority had the Kochester Meeting to bind American botanists 

 by any such code of nomenclature as a majority of the members 

 present might see fit to adopt ? It is perfectly clear that its sole 

 authority lay in the united dictation of the various botanists 

 present. We confess we find it somewhat amusing — after all the 

 protest against one-man authority, no matter how great that man 

 might be, and after all the laudation of the democracy 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 one ! The matter practically 

 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 dis- 

 approval 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 botanists, 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 tlie name of 

 the original author of the specific name does not explain the 

 binomial. There are, moreover, no indications 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 autlior altogether. 

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

 are farther from this agreement than we were ten years ago. Ail 

 this is a natural result of the unjustifiable attempt to apply rules 

 too strictly in many respects to the past, over which no botanist 

 can expect to legislate if he knows anything of conditions outside of 

 his herbarium walls. If the supporters of tiie Rochester Code think 

 they have a right to upset important results of nomenclature evo- 

 lution for nearly a century and a half merely to help out their 

 theories, they must be veritable Eip van Winkles, just awakened 

 from a comfortable nap of years. 



We sincerely regret that so many of our younger botanists have 

 been led astray by this ignis fatmis of theory, and so blinded to the 

 clear, fixed lights of sound judgment and of practice. No code of 

 botanical nomenclature can hope to accomplish good results that 

 does not meet the needs of the time ; this the Eochester Code does 

 not do. W^e cannot afford to begin over again, or submit to 



