BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE OF NORTH AMERICA. 979 
several specific names. Whatever may have induced him now 
and then, in critical essays, to write in disparagement of this 
usage, one who studies him in his books and monographs 
must see that he not only had a very strong predilection for 
the oldest specific names, but was willing to transgress rules 
which he professed to respect and be governed by, in order to 
keep such names in use. 
Dr. Watson, who is also cited as if exemplifying more 
approved methods in nomenclature, has made himself, in 
some of his pages, a luminous example of our “new school” 
usage. For a good illustration, we have but to advert to his 
readjustments in the specific nomenclature of Onagracee, in 
the first volume of the Botany of California. Spach, in pro- 
posing the genera Godetia and Boisduvalia, had dropped a 
number of very old specific names which the plants had been 
known by under CEnofthera ; and Dr. Watson, with what we, 
his American colleagues, consider a commendable zeal for 
thorough priority, restored those old neglected names, every 
one; and so we read, in the place referred to, G'odetia pur- 
purea Watson instead of the much older combination G. 
Willdenoviana Spach, G. tenella Watson instead of G. Cava- 
nillesii Spach, Boisduvalia densiflora Watson in place of B. 
Douglasii Spach, and so on. 
I shall be far from asserting that our elders have followed 
this rule. On some of their pages they conform to this, on 
others to some other, and the having of so many rules is 
equivalent to having none at all. That this is the true condi- 
tion of botanical nomenclature in America, with all authors, 
up to a somewhat recent date, one has but to look into our 
most pretentious treatises to see. I have been constrained 
lately to remark this unhappy fact! For any two or three 
botanists to have settled down to any one particular usage, or 
to have subjected themselves to any code whatever, would 
have been to form, in America, a * new school.”  A,.number 
of us young workers have, in so far as I know, without any 
i CR en oes eine eee eae oe 
1 PrrrontA, i. p. 185. 
