272 PITTONIA. 



of Moeliring's and Siegesbeck's good genera as a ^* foolish 

 raking up of names." Linnaeus' first edition of the Systoma 

 he meant as an important and finished work of its kind. 

 To cut all expressions down to their lowest intelligible terms 

 and to make a book that should be a success, was a part of 

 his well contrived plan to gain ascendancy as a "reformer^' 

 of genera, and inventor of a new and curious system of classes 

 of plants. One critic may no doubt say, if be will, that "Lin- 

 naeus, as the inventor of the received nomenclature, had a 

 perfectly free hand, and it is monstrous to thitik of imposing 

 on him those restrictions which have become necessary since 

 his time;" but another may as well and as safely say, first, that 

 Linnieus invented absolutely nothing but a set of most arti- 

 ficially and empirically circumscribed plant orders and classes; 

 and second, that it is monstrous to think of imposing upon 

 the learned and venerable botanists of that time the obligation 

 of sitting eighteen years in idleness and silence, waiting for 

 the young iconoclast to have finished what they called his 

 work of "confusion" before they published any more new 

 genera of plants. Unless Moehring and Siegesbeck and some 

 even more able men of their time were under some such 

 curious restriction, the genera which they published as new in 

 173G, have no other valid scientific designations at the present 

 moment, than those they gave them. 



With Mr. Jackson's disapproval of Dr. Kuntze's amend- 



Hondhcs 



if inio Mokiifi 



ir 



The "Revisio Generum" doubtless loses some of its force 

 through what seems to me the author's almost Liniieean 

 wantonness of assumption along such lines. But I do not 

 think that the matter of adopting, for example, Tragncaniha 

 in place of Astragalus, can in justice be relegated to the 

 category of the "author's whims." It is a Avell grounded and 

 long admitted rule— though witli this as with rules in 

 general, it happens that some ignore it— that precedence is 

 the same as priority in the absence of literal priority; and 

 Tragacantha has precedence over Aslragalus, taking what 



