17S THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



his descrijition to the British species. Avith whicli alone he was con- 

 cerned. In Journ. 13ot. 1912 (p. 257) Mr. Druce has a further note 

 in sup})ort of Ilelleborine. 



II. FiLix "Hill. 



Mr. O. A. Farwell sends me a reprint of a jjaper entitled " Fern 

 Notes" which he contributed to the Eighteenth Annual lieportof the 

 Michigan Academy of Science (December 1916, pp. 78-94). In this 

 lie pro])Oses to employ generically the name Fllix — which, as he points 

 out, has already been adopted by Underwood and others, on the 

 ground of its emplo^'ment by Adanson (1763) in that sense for Bern- 

 hardi's Cystojjft'rls, — basing his ])i'oposition on its use by Hill in 1755. 



At the outset it may be of interest to note that this is not 

 the first edition of HilUs work, which was published anonymously in 

 the preceding year — 1754 : we have a copy of this in the Depart- 

 ment of Botany, but it is noticed neither by Pritzel nor Jackson. 

 The 1755 issue was printed from the same plates and diifers from the 

 first only by the addition of a dedication of four pages — " To the 

 Honourable the Lady Betty Germain," whose virtues are fulsomely 

 narrated although Hill styles himself " a stranger " to her, — wdth the 

 author's name, the date, and the words " second edition," which last 

 seem to have escaped the notice of the bibliographers mentioned. In 

 our copy of the 1754 issue, at the end of the preface, is a note in 

 Hill's hand which announces as forthcoming his British Herbal : 

 " January 24th, 1756. No. 1 To he continued Weekly and to he 

 Published in 50 Numbers to Consist of one Yolume folio Qd each 

 Number " : the numbers were actuall}^ 52. 



I find it impossible to discover on what ground Mr. Farwell 

 bases his conclusion that Hill intended to establish a genus, nor do 

 I see that his quotations from Hill's jDreface have any bearing on the 

 matter. Mr. Farwell rightly points out that " the Latin names are 

 either uninomials, binomials, or polynomials" and that "the work 

 contains no generic descriptions as such " : this being so, how can we 

 recognize as a genus of Hill what he certainly never thus defined ? 

 Mr. Farwell's reasoning is ingenious rather than convincing : 

 having first laid down that " the names Filix mas and Filix fa^mina 

 as liere used by Hill must be considered as true binomials " — a state- 

 ment to which I demur — he proceeds to build on this assum])ti(>n 

 thus : *' Since the binomial has been effectively published it follows 

 that each element of tlie binomial, that is to say, that the generic 

 name and the s])ecific name each has been effectively ])ublished and 

 the proper citation for the genus is Filix (Fuchs) Hill, [Useful] 

 Family Herbal, 171, 1755."* 



Again, Hill a})plies the name Filix to two plants now universally 

 regarded as generically distinct: Filix mas { = L((str('a Filix-mas) 

 and Filix (or, as he prints it Felix) ftemina { = Fteris aquilina). 

 Mr. Farwell restricts the name to the former genus, presumably on 

 the ground of " priority of place " — a principle which, if carried out, 

 would lead to astonishing results : e. g. those who, following most 

 systematists, unite Amyrjdalus with Prunus would, if they adopted 

 * This by the way it certainly is not : the page is 1 11. 



