34 
MR. HELLER AND NOMENCLACTURE. 
The publication of the eacls on nomenclature in my last 
Contributions seems to have given Mr. Heller (in Muhlenbergia) 
‘a bad attack of mental colic, recurrent colic. His capacity to ap- 
preciate the motive and scope of my criticisms reminds one of the 
Englishman who after traveling extensively in this country re- 
turned home and said to his admiring friends “The Americans are 
a very clever people but they have many uncouth expressions, 
in they say Where am I at, we would say Where his my ’a 
Mr. Heller says he believes that the first name applied Me a 
thing should stand. Just so. For the last fifteen years we have 
heard nothing else, ad nauseam, except once a synonym always a 
synonym, as though this were a panacea for all botanical ills. If 
so then why does he not apply it? Why do not the other Brit- 
tonians ? if priority is much more valuable than to accept the 
common usage of the botanical world and is in fact the sine qua 
non in botany why do they take the utterly inconsistent position 
that priority must not sa earner than 1753 nor in any other lan- 
guage than Latin? What magic is there in the year 1753 any 
more than in 753, 53 or 3? No one is so stupid as to believe that 
botany began in 1753. Many plants were more accurately de- 
y as many people as the Baaleh nor ever came as near to a 
World language as our tongue comes now. The reason most bot- 
anists take this year and this language as the starting points is 
not because they regard priority as valuable in the Dark Ages of 
botany, but because by starting there they are enabled to keep bot- 
anical names stable, and a stable nomenclature is the one great 
desideratum, and this can come only by common consent and not 
by any erbitrary rules whose application would upset tne whole 
