THE GENUS ALSINE 19'J 



as this had ah'eady been correctly placed in Stellaria by Villars ; 

 and then it was perfectly natural that he should take the second 

 species {A. mucronata L.) as the type of his genus. Thus, from 

 Gaertner's point of view, the third species {A. segetalis L.) does 

 not enter into the discussion. Gaertner's view was adopted by 

 Wahlenberg (Fl. Lapp. 1812; Veg. Helv. 1813; Fl. Suec. 1826), 

 who made the necessary new combinations for the species as he 

 dealt with them in his various works. Wahlenberg has been 

 followed by the vast majority of botanists, including Syme & 

 Williams in this country. Wahlenberg, in fact, is usually cited 

 as the authority of the genus, though Wahlenberg himself refers 

 his Alsine to Gaertner. It is, from my point of view, quite 

 immaterial whether Gaertner or Wahlenberg is cited as the 

 authority : the genus is the same in either case, even though 

 Wahlenberg has referred species of Spcrgularia to it ; it is, of 

 course, erroneous to ascribe it to Scopoli (c/. Dalla Torre & Sarn- 

 theim Gen. Siphonog. 157, 1900), for the Alsme of Scopoli, as has 

 been shown, has nothing to do with Alsiiic of any European 

 botanists and must be sunk in Stellaria L. 



With regard to Gaertner's use of the second edition of the 

 Species Plantarum, it must be borne in mind that the first 

 edition was a very rare book in his day, and, indeed, almost 

 inaccessible to the great majority of the botanists of the eighteenth 

 and of the first half of the nineteenth centuries. A reprint of the 

 first edition, and greatly increased facihties of travel, have rendered 

 the first edition accessible to the majority of botanists ; but the 

 early botanists adopted the only sensible and practicable course 

 when they used the second rather than the first edition of the 

 Species, because they could not check or verify the names of 

 the first edition. The fashion of citing the second edition as the 

 starting-point still persists, as, e.g., in Eouy & Foucaud's Fl. de 

 France ; and it is one of the easiest tests of a mere copier to find 

 if he adds " 1753 " to the page of the second edition. It is a 

 question whether it would not have been better, in the interests 

 of nomenclatorial stability, for the Vienna Congress to have 

 adopted the second instead of the first edition as the commence- 

 ment of the names of vascular plants, because the second edition 

 had virtually, for the reasons just given, been taken as the 

 starting-point of nomenclature by nearly all the earlier post- 

 Linnean botanists, who have thus impressed the names of the 

 second edition so deeply in botanical literature and botanical 

 thought that it is useless nowadays to attempt to change them."'- 



* It was with all this in mind that I decided (see Cambr. Brit. Fl. ii. p. xiii. 

 1914), iu order to avoid some undesirable changes of specific names which would 

 be necessitated by rigidly adhering to the first edition of the Species FlaiUariun 

 as the starting-point of nomenclature, to begin with the second edition in the 

 case of those species which were subdivided into two or more species by 

 Linnaeus himself in the second edition. In the case of these latter species, it 

 is the names of the second edition that have become common to all countries ; 

 and thus this slight departure from the letter of the Vienna Rules will always 

 result in conserving established specific names. I can conceive of no one, except 

 the stickler for mere priority, objecting to this little innovation. 



