186 PITTONIA. 



that name. 



Mei 



met with acceptance, Kanth proposed a fourth ; all this 

 repetition of the same name within the space of twenty years. 

 But when the twenty had increased to twenty-five, the tide 

 began to turn. Several keen-eyed botanists of a new gener- 

 ation began to see for themselves^ in the peculiar habit and 

 aspect of those graceful soft blue-green " Pulmonarias " a 

 good generic type. The oldest Mertensia was either .for- 

 gotten, or believed to be too long dead and buried to be worth 

 the attempt to revive it. Hartmann in 1820 gave the genus a 

 new name, Hippoglossitm. Dumortier in 1823 called it a 

 new genus Casselia. Eeichenbach in 1830 created another 

 synonym for it in his Sfeenhammera. Meanwhile the least 

 popular, but one of the most acute and learned, as well as 

 among the most original of all British botanists in any age, 

 S. F. Gray, had both recognized the validity of the genus and 

 reapplied its rightful name, Meriensia, in 1821. So, within 

 thirty-three years— the space of a single generation, as history 

 may be reckoned— a desirable generic name is applied to four 

 different genera, and the genus to which it was first applied 

 acquires four different names. 



I have cited this case, merely because it is an easily access- 

 ible one to any who may wish to look into the subject for 

 himself ; not because it is at all a complicated or particularly 

 Texatious instance of its kind ; for, unhappily, it is not. 

 There are several instances in which a name has been more 

 often repeated, involving alteration in the names of a greater 

 number of species; indeed, this practice of applying the 

 same name successively to from three to half a dozen genera, 

 has been the most prolific of all the causes of that which 

 botanists everywhere declaim against— the incessant change 

 of names. I have wondered that leading botanists did not, 

 long ago cease giving countenance to tlie usage in question ; 

 for several of them must have observed how inimical it is to 

 all stability in nomenclature. I know it may be said that 

 desirable generic names, particularly such as commemorate 

 distinguished men, are sometimes applied in the first instance, 



