230 PITTONIA. 
will ever ke likely to accept the genera of plants in his district 
according to the definitions and limitations of even such great 
masters of general botany as the authors of the Genera Plan- 
tarum. This circumstance, although a most certain fact in 
my own view, is one which I should not have put forth if the 
greatest men had not freely conceded its truth. If true, it 
will justify my statement that the great work on synonomy 
“which is steadily approaching completion”! is sure to be 
more productive of mere empty synonyms, than all other books 
and papers that have been printed in the last half-century. 
But there is another treatise upon genera, younger than 
that of Bentham and Hooker, which is approaching comple- 
tion; one in which the genera of the world are assigned very 
different limits from those fixed by Bentham and Hooker. I 
refer to Baillon’s Histoire ; a work which, for scholarship, and 
the care and skill with which the plant world has been investi- 
gated, and that originally, by the illustrious author of the 
treatise, will give it weight on the continent of Europe which 
will counterbalance the influence of Bentham and Hooker in 
Britain and North America. But almost hundreds of the 
genera allowed by the authors last named, Baillon reduces, 
and that with a display of facts and arguments which almost 
drive us, against our will, from our old prejudices concerning 
the great number of plant genera. Now, what of the syno- 
nyms that will follow, in case some zealous friend and country- 
man of M. Baillon shall provide for the renaming of all plant 
. Species after Baillon’s genera ? I refer to this only to show 
that there is a tinge of unconscious injustice in the outery 
made against the botanists who make a synonym or two à 
month by restoring an old specific name. These few scarcely 
add so many drops to the ocean of synonymy in which we are 
by and by to be deluged. 
Let me, in conclusion of these paragraphs, foreshadow one 
more terror, for those of our friends who so greatly dread a 
few new synonyms. There seem reasons for suspecting that, 
1. Journ. Bot. xxvi. 262. 
