190 PITTONIA. 
Two years later, coming to the fulfillment of his purpose of 
an universal binomial nomenclature, he gave it its merely - 
decorative or balancing appendage of a specific name and 
called it Sarothra gentianoides. A half century subsequent 
to this, the author of Michaux’s Flora found the generic rank 
unmerited and transferred the solitary species to H ypericum, 
following Linnmus! own usage, and, as I conceive of it, the 
true logie of priority, in calling it as a species, by its old- 
generic and at once oldest name, Sarothra. - Entirely similar 
is the history of Rhododendron Rhodora, Gmel.; and, in 
view of all these considerations, I see not how H ypericun 
gentianoides and Rhododendron Canadense ot the catalogue 
are defensible. 
Equally obscure to me is that logie, if there be any, 
according to which, a specific name when once published 
may be displaced in order to the promotion of a prior 
varietal one. There are, in the catalogue, quite a number 
of new binary names formed in this way. The practice is 
unmistakably at variance with one fundamental principle 
of all order and system, namely, that seniority of lower 
rank can not take precedence of juniority in a higher. I do 
not assert that in the affairs of biological nomenclature, this 
ground-principle of order may not be abandoned. But I do 
not think it ought to be. And its abandonment would not 
seem to be justifiable except upon the single possible con- 
tingency that there is obligation to keep up a given varietal 
name when the variety is raised to specific rank. That there 
is liberty to do this, no one doubts. That it is expedient 
im Many cases, and even desirable, none will question; but, 
to say that is obligatory, and must always be done, save in 
such exceptional cases as are allowed in the transference of 
species, with their names, from genus to genus, is to entail 
a formidable suite of consequences which I do not think we 
should any of us be willing, after due consultation, to allow. 
If a varietal name must be preserved upon the raising of 
the variety to specific rank, then a subgeneric name must be - 
preserved upon the promotion of the subgenus to the rank of 
