78 
priority applied up sh year 1753 only. This was a common 
sense basis of settlem 
n recent years a gai coterie of American botanists appar- 
ently moved more by institutional jealousy than by any desire to 
benefit botany have attempted by hook and by crook to devise some 
method by which to unsettle names and get a chance to rename 
many species. One of these schemes was trying to adopt priority 
of a name out of the genus. For example, Astragalus Smithii 
Aimee This gives a chance to make a new name for Astrag- 
alus Smithii even if it has been used and is well known all over 
that a genus never was ee ili’ unless it had a species at- ° 
tached to it. This would invalidate all the Linnean genera of th> 
Systema and Genera Plantarum not found in the Species Plant- 
arum. It would be just as sensible to invalidate all the Linnean 
genera of the Species Plantarum on the ground that no genera 
were published there. The attempt to adopt these rules has en- 
hardship on our graduates of agricultural and scientific colleges, 
and is incidentally a still greater infliction on those who have to 
get sense ovt of their pigeon-latin. The writer does not favor 
this rule though it would not be any hardship on him, nor would 
it he on any of the older men who have had the benefit of a clas- 
sical education. 
up the subject from a taxonomic point of view we - 
king 
find that the Linnzan conception of species was nonintergr tada- 
tion, and the conception of genus was a group of species (or in 
