35 
fabric of accepted names as the Brittonian system has done and 
3 
is doing in the hands of its adherent 
Yow suppose Mr. Heller were to be consistent and really do ~ 
what he says is the only thing to do, use prior names, he would 
naturally work the English language first. His botanical god- 
father Britton would allow him to follow his own example doubt- 
less in putting a Latin tail on his English words, a la Manihota 
Britton for Manihot L. Suppose he takes up the gooseberries and 
currants to which he has given some study, his new names would 
_ pan out about as follows: gooseberrya lacustris Heiler, Curranta 
_ Teda Heller (it should be remembered that the great law of prior- 
ity demands that we should publish the name exactly as it was 
first given, although Britton would allow us to Latinize the tail, 
apparently the most important part of it, we therefore must not 
_ say rubra but red-a). Now after he has Hellerized all the Eng- 
lish names of these fruits and gotten the Hellerian tail properly 
adjusted to all, he will find that the Greek antedates the English, 
then he can get up another new set of names from the Sanscrit, 
then the Chinese, then he might take up the Egyptian and give 
still another batch of new names. By the time the botanical public 
has begun to recover from the last of these inflictions it is likely 
that the phonograph and the graphophone will be so perfected that 
they can take the ripple marks made by sound waves on prehis- 
toric mud (now turned to stone) produced by the incoherent bab- 
blings of some of the simian ancestors of the Brittonians, and re- 
produce them so that they will be as lucid as some recent descrip- _ 
tions of plants, and will have far stronger claim to priority of pub- — 
_ lication than the Brittonian check list had-at the time when it was - 
said to have been published. ¥ sce 
Yes, priority is a great thing-—for making changes-in estab- 
lished names. as 
Mr. Heller says he believes in splitting. This is really a re- 
dundant remark. For anyone who can publish the same species 
in three different genera at once as he did in his Catalogue of 
North American plants must be a splitter of splitters, outdoing 
even Curie the chemist, for the latter only segregated the Radium 
atom a split from Uranium, but Heller must have gotten far be- 
yond that and found the botanical electrons. : 
” -He goes onto say that any name whatever applied to a plant 
‘Ought to be a specific name. It makes one shudder at hen he — 
would inflict on systematic botany if he were to go thr eg ud- 
worth’s catalogue of trees and make specific names ct all th 
