708 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
Linneus surpassed immeasurably every author who had preceded 
him in the practice of generic diagnosis was that he had all their 
understanding and appreciation of calyx, corolla, and fruit, and 
added to that his mastery of stamens, stigmas, and styles, the very 
names of which were unknown to the generations that had preceded 
him, and hardly yet known to the most celebrated of his contempo- 
raries. In the later editions of the Genera Plantarum no improve- 
ment is to be noted in his diagnoses. They were models as he gave 
them out at first, at least as viewed from the standpoint of Linneeus’s 
acknowledged greater master, Cesalpino. They are still essentially 
the models of generic diagnosis with all who still hold the Cesal- 
pinian doctrine that flower and fruit are to supply the only recognized 
data for the establishment of classes and genera of plants. Even 
George Bentham, who lived more than a century after the time of 
Linneus, and was the supreme master of generic diagnosis that the 
nineteenth century knew, was strictly a Linnean in this regard; so 
that here, as at many another important point in the most recent 
botany, the genius of the great Linnzus rules and directs. 
Fellow-members of the Botanical Society of Washington, if this 
had been a meeting of our own, and not that of two other learned 
societies in joint session with us, I should have preferred, as I said at 
the beginning, to discuss some one of Linnzeus’s greater books, taking 
it as a text from which to set forth his deeds, his many benefactions 
to our science. To some it will doubtless appear anomalous that here 
not so much as the briefest abstract of his various reforms in nomen- 
clature should be given; especially since, in the minds of so many bot- 
anists of recent decades, those reforms are thought to be the most im- 
portant service that Linneus rendered to botany. Several of the 
most commonly received opinions about him as nomenclator are abso- 
Intely groundless. Several principles of nomenclature now almost 
everywhere approved were under his severest reprehension. Inas- 
much as I myself was the prime mover in the direction of what has 
now come to be well known abroad as the Neo-American school of 
nomenclature, I may be permitted to say that during more than 
twenty years past I have steadily and unwaveringly been of the opin- 
ion that to attempt to legislate upon nomenclature is but futility, if 
not folly, until every participant in every nomenclatorial conclave 
shall have familiarized himself with all that Linneus said, and said 
with such commanding authority, upon this subject. So, then, the 
discussion of Linnzus as nomenclator, at least in my understanding 
and appreciation of him, could not alone be done within the time 
allotted us to-night. To omit it altogether was imperative. 
The same limitations have precluded my calling attention even 
briefly to Linneus as evolutionist, as ecologist, as medical botanist, or 
