RAYS CATALOGUS. 183 
list for the simple reason that Linnzeus applied them to other 
species than those which they designated according to the 
earlier usage. There is, for example, a Lamium album in 
Ray, but it is not the Lamium album of Linnzeus; and there 
isa Veratrum nigrum of the old authors, also in Ray's Cata- 
logue, and this is not a Veratrum at all, but the Helleborus 
niger of Linneus. But the instances in which the author of 
the immortal Species Plantarum transposed things, giving 
old binary names a new application, are, I believe, neither 
very numerous nor difficult to detect. 
That the forty-eight names given above constitute a com- 
plete list of all of their kind to be found in this little volume 
of Ray, is not probable. A more thorough gleaning of the 
pages, doubtless, would have yielded several more; and, if 
fifty such Linnean binary names occur, some in the front 
rank of names, others in the synonymy, in this antique local 
flora of a small distriet, we may anticipate a total of several 
hundred from a thorough canvass of the old standards of 
pre-Linnzean botany. Such papers as Courtois’ Commentary 
on Dodoens, and Klinsmann’s Clavis Dilleniana, exhibit, at a 
glance, many not here enumerated. 
To say that every such name ought to be credited, in all 
our modern books and catalogues, not to Linnzus but to its 
real author, is only speaking in accordance with an acknowl- 
edged general principle which governs men, or ought to 
govern them, in all literary work whether scientific or general ; 
that prineiple of faithfulness to history, which forbids the 
ascribing to an author that which he took from another and 
an earlier treatise. To this principle it is time, it seems to 
me, that systematie botanists should begin to pay more strict 
allegiance. There are some among us who wil. I have 
therefore been partieular to trace each name above given to 
what seems to me to be its true and original author; and, 
since many of the books cited are rare and their abbreviated 
titles unfamiliar, I have written them in full, or at least, as 
nearly so as seems necessary to a ready understanding of who 
the author is, and what is the name of the volume. 
