BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE OF NORTH AMERICA. 271 
one, and we have welcomed it, notwithstanding that it bears 
rather heavily upon some of us in America. 
Without asking for space in which to discuss a number of 
interesting propositions set forth by Mr. Britten in the body 
of his article, I must be permitted to try to correct a wrong 
impression which will have been made by his opening para- 
graph, feeling confident that he, no less than others, will 
welcome the correction. 
It is quite erroneous to say, as the Editor does say, im- 
plieitly, if not in just so many words, that, while an older 
generation of American botanists have been and are governed 
by established laws in nomenclature, a new school has arisen 
whose aim is to introduce a new system, one which is thought 
objectionable as bringing in “fresh elements of confusion." 
Not to pause for a moment in explanation or defense of a 
system which, so far from being new, our esteemed critie 
himself knows to have been long recognised and adhered to 
as the correct one, in almost every one of the great branches 
of systematic biology outside of the one department of phane- 
rogamie botany; in which latter branch, even, it has had 
respectable advocates; I am only called upon to show that 
no contrast quite so striking really exists between the practices 
of ourselves of the *new school" if so we are to be called, 
and those of our elders. 
We are censured in this; that we suffer ourselves to be 
governed by the principle of priority in relation to specific, as 
wellas generie, names. Since we had to be subjected to an 
ordeal so rather trying as that of a comparison of our own 
wisdom and diseretion with those of our fathers,—for by such 
comparison the younger inevitably, and perhaps always more 
or less justly, suffers, —it might have been well to mention the 
one thing wherein we should seem commendable above those 
who have gone before us, i. e., our resolute defence of, and 
abiding by, the law of priority in generic names. The earlier 
race of American botanists herein exhibit a laxity of view, 
with which our own strictness forms a contrast ; and it is not 
from any representatives of an old school in America that 
; Issued March 30, 1559. 
