NOMENCLATURE AND BOTANICAL SYSTEMS. 



It has now been some fourteen yenrs since the Brittoniaa 

 ;>\stcm was railroaded through the Botanical Club of the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science under 

 false colors as a "list of the plants" after packing the club with 

 the adherents of the scheme and so fixing it that the real botaii- ^ 

 ists of the country were never appealed to to authorize it, 

 nor even the members of the Association as such, the subject 

 never having been put to a vote of all the members, but this 

 system has been put out by. its adherents as that of the Associa- 

 tion. The primary object of the scheme was well known to 

 he the boosting of a certain book published by the chief origin- 

 ator of the plan and incidentally to try to take from Harvard 

 the supremacy in botany. Whatever may have been the mo- 

 tive for it the botanical public would have acquiesced had the 

 nomenclature presented been based on sound principles, but 

 it was not. It was claimed to be a panacea for all nomencla- 

 tural ills. Its practical application by its adherents instead of 

 making nomenclature stable, opened the flood gates for change 

 and since its adoption has made something like 50,000 changes 

 and new names where a possible 1,000 or 2,000 would have 

 been ample under the old rules. It professed to be a simple 

 revision of the names of the plants of a restricted area of the 

 U. S., but when finally set before the public it was not only a 

 new system of nomenclature, but a new botanical system' as 

 well, whose chief object was to completely upset the whole 

 fabric of modern botany, changing the point of view with no 

 compensating advantage. 



The avowed object of the system was to avoid the use 

 of common sense and in its place give a rigid legalism with- 

 out exceptions, but before the system had been in \\se to speak 

 of Britton himself violated it (see Robinson's criticism). 



Its chief virtue was in a rigid adherence to priority. Ward 

 in defending it. quotes Jordan with approval when he says that 

 if you do not use the first name applied to a thing then 

 you can use any one you wish, a specious argument seemingly 

 conclusive, but in fact absurd. When we come to examine this 

 in its application, we find that it isn't priority if it goes back 

 f-'rther than 175.3, and it is not prioritv if it is not in the Latin 

 language. If there is any force in the so-called priority it 



