BR. KUNTZE AND HIS REVIEWERS. 265 



proposition wliicli, to any one at all conversant with tlie his- 

 tory of the period embraced, will seem a surprising one to 

 have been enunciated from so celebrated a seat of botanical 

 learning as Kew. I can not even briefly answer Mr. Ilemsley 

 at this point without adverting to another very distinctly 

 marked epoch, and a very great one too, in the history of 

 plant naming. It is an era of less than fifty years' duration, 

 but it is absolutely the only period in tlie history of plant 

 naming in which matters proceeded wath anything like 

 smoothness. I refer to the splendid epoch which opened 

 with Tournefort in 1G94: and closed with Linnaeus in 1735. It 

 was an era which gave great things and great names to botani- 

 cal science; first of all, a method of defining, delimiting and 

 naturally arranging genera; and it was a time when botany 

 attracted to itself the learning and the mental acumen of the 

 ablest men of the day. Botanical exploration Avent on at a 

 good rate both at home and abroad, and both new and elab- 

 orate local floras^ and volumes of new genera and new species 

 were put forth in rapid succession by men like Ray, Tourne- 

 fort, Plumier, Vaillant, Dillenius, Boerhaave, Micheli, Haller, 

 and many men of less note, though of sound learning and much 

 force. These represent a time when men, particularly 

 scholars, had a lively sense of justice, botanists universally 

 respected the law of priority in nomenclature, and kept the 

 law scrupulously. This was a period concerning which no 

 man could write what Mr. Hemsley writes of the Linna^an 

 epoch, that " some influential botanists did not scruple to 

 ignore the published names of their contemporaries, or alter 

 them upon the most trivial grounds ; and there was almost 

 universal laxity in citing authorities," 

 Now I wish to ask if this passage of Mr. Hemsley— good 



enough as descriptive of the times of the Linn^ean supremacy 

 is at all congruous with that in which he represents matters 

 as proceeding with tolerable smoothness? In his printed 

 column they are the two parts of one sentence. At a time 

 when men in the highest botanical station had no literary or 

 scientific moral sense, and being themselves of mediocre 



