236 PITTONIA. 
system (if such honor be strictly his), will not call for his 
being credited with the scores of binomials which he not only 
did not make, but which he found already made, and long in 
common use. 
To say that “these names being composed of two words 
only is a mere accident,” is perhaps not speaking very accu- 
rately; yet, granting it to be so, what foree is there to the 
argument? Are not the greatest of discoveries, and the most 
serviceable inventions, commonly due to what is called acci- 
dent ? It was doubtless by mere accident that the old botan- 
ists discovered that, when conversing about this or that 
species, they could avoid the long descriptive phrases of the 
books, and yet perfectly understand one another, by using 
only two words selected from the phrase. There was, for 
instance, the old descriptive phrase, Ranunculus pratensis 
erectus acris (Bauhin); but for oral purposes, it was enough 
o say Ranunculus acris. If this last was sufficient for an 
intelligible conversation about the plant, it was enough for a 
printed index of plant-names; and who can doubt that many 
binary names came into established use, long before Linn:eus, 
in just this accidental way ? And yet, the formation of these 
binomials with the ancients was not accidental, after all. The 
first word of Dodoens’ Ranunculus aquatilis had been for ages 
a settled generic name; and the like had been true in the 
majority of such cases. The second word was likewise, in 
most instances, if not in every one, an adjective describing: 
some peculiarity of the species. We might therefore, if it 
seemed worth while to invite further controversy upon the 
matter, deny that the formation of old binomials was at all 
accidental, except in rare instances. 
As for Linnzeus’ having been the first to reduce nomen- 
clature to a system by proposing regularly, the binomial 
method, it may be we are all the while conceding more than 
is historically true when we admit it. It is not easy to give 
up old prejudices. Those of us who were American school- 
boys twenty-five or thirty years ago would have been some- 
what startled if one had told us that Columbus had not been 
