CONCERNING THE MAKING OF MANY SYNONYMS. 
A significant proportion of that burden of them, under 
which the literature of botany already labors, is directly 
chargeable to the loose and apparently only half serious 
manner in which the binomial system, so long in process of 
evolution, was at last offered to the scientific world for its 
acceptance ; for it made its full appearance based on no set 
of enunciated principles ; subject to no formulated rules. It 
was left to shape its own uncertain course according to the 
various and conflicting notions of differently minded indi- 
viduals. 
Linnzeus liked well to occupy the lawgiver's seat in science. 
Why did he fail to legislate for that method of nomenclature 
which proposed to make universal? He could have ordered 
that the specific name should be considered permanent; and 
doubtless all the world would have acceded to the proposition, 
and so, synonyms by the thousand which now confront us, 
would have ben kept out of existence. Why did he, the 
careful systematist, have so many loose threads? Perhaps 
he did not forecast the dangers; could not foresee that a 
binomial nomenclature, making species so easily handled, also 
opened a door to the easy making of many synonyms. The 
only precautionary hint which I know of his having put forth 
upon this point, is that in the preface to the first edition of 
the Species Plantarum, in which he speaks of the confusion 
which will ensue if men attempt to place in the rank of species, 
and give specific names to multitudinous forms which he has 
placed in the lower rank ; the very thing which a subsequent 
generation found it incumbent on them to do, in order to dis- 
entangle the Linnean confusion of species. Almost all the 
