BIBLIOGKAPHICAL NOTES. 



307 



scientific principle of priority the finishing of the Kew Index has 

 been unfair. Even Mr. Jackson found often older names to be 

 renewed, if he were allowed to do so according to his early promise ; 

 so he wrote only thereto : nomen prius ! But Mr. Dyer is innocent of 

 tliat unfair finishing, for, so far as I know, he scarcely gave any 

 line to the Kew Index ; although a good director of Kew Gardens, 

 he is neither an experienced specialist in nomenclature nor a 

 working systematist, as I showed already in Kev. gen. pi. ecci/iii. 

 The quoted speech of Mr. Dyer in 1895 finished such : — "All that 

 can be hoped is a general agreement amongst the staffs of the 

 principal institutions in different countries where systematic botany 

 is worked at; the free-lances must be left to do as they like." Mr. 

 Stapf translated free-lances into German with Wilde. Till now the 

 Kew botanists always refused to work in agreement of nomenclature 

 with any other botanical institution or Congress ! Now Mr. Dyer 

 insults the 80-90 % of botanists, who do not agree with the Kew- 

 nomenclature as free-lances or Wilde. Does Mr. Dyer not know 

 that science was often more promoted by "free-scientists" than by 

 business-botanists in high position? Even if Mr. Dyer would be 

 willing and able to obtain such an agreement, it would not be 

 possible to base it on the Kew Index, of which the validity of names 

 has been justly doubted by himself. Moreover the most prominent 

 botanic institutions have such different and arbitrary nomenclatures 

 that no agreement between them is possible, inasmore as some 

 directors of such institutions do not like to correct the wrong 

 nomenclature of their works. They could only be corrected by the 

 majority of other botanists and surely that will be done in future. 

 The confusion in nomenclature is now too large everywhere and 

 locally ; in Berlin, e. g. difierent names for the same genus are 

 sometimes used by several officers of the botanic Museum and 

 others published in the same time two different names to the 

 same new plants : the arbitrary and the international name ! 

 Only an international competent Congress with the necessary 

 preparation can bring order into botanic nomenclature by a way 

 shown in my paper: " Les besoins de la nomenclature botanique." 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 



XII. — The Dates of Rees's Cyclopedia. 



[The following paper, issued privately at the end of last year by 

 Mr. B. D. Jackson, is here reprinted with his permission. The 

 information in square brackets is additional to the original publi- 

 cation, and is taken from Mr. B. B. Woodward's notes in the copy 

 of the paper in the Natural History Museum. — Ed. Journ. Bot.] 



It is nearly nineteen years since I first endeavoured to discover 

 the actual dates on which the several parts of Rees's Cyclopaedia 

 were issued. In the Journal of Botany, April, 1877, 107, 108, 

 I printed all I had then been able to ascertain. 



