276 



PITTONTA. 



assent; but I \vOul(J ast how, upon his own principles, that 

 can be, since he insists that every name used as a specific by 

 LinnaBus mast be preserved in its integrity, even in the 

 extreme case where the specific becomes a duplicate of the 

 generic name. By tlie code of the ornitliologists to which he 

 has announced his full submission, the name of this weed 

 must be Bursa Bursa pasforis. 



Citing Dr. Kuntze's return to the primitive applications of 

 Erijsi mum, Nasturiium and other names of cruciferous genera, 

 his comments run thus: " The unnecessary mischief of going 

 back to the Systema Plantarum of 1735 is well illustrated by 

 these four citations. It overturns several hundred specific 

 names in very closely related genera, and, as far as I can see, 

 has absolutely nothing to be said in its favor" Well; the 

 deed which had absolutely nothing to be said in its favor was 

 that of Linmeus, when in 1737 he transposed all these four 

 names, attaching each one to a genus which almost from time 

 immemorial had been known by one of the other names. It 

 was this wilful, presumptuous and wholly inexcusable trans- 

 posing of names which made tUe better class of Linnfeus' 

 contemporaries iu 1737 look on him with distrust. It was 

 ^'^J*'° '^''^ *^^e mischief; and Dr. Kuntze, by going back to 

 17ou-the time when Linnaeus himself had not ventured to 

 remove the ancient landmarks nor dispossess these four 

 genera of their right names by wanton transpositions-has 

 simply been true to priority. This must be admitted as iii 

 favor of what he has done; while if his 1735 starting-point be 

 the legal one, he has obeyed the law. 



Mr. Jackson has well denounced as a "spurious priority" 

 that with which Dr. Kuntze sometimes aflP^^cts to invest sub- 

 generic names by placing them on a level with the generic, 

 degrading to the rank of synonyms the oldest generic names 

 when they happen to be more recent than the sectional ones; 

 and Dr. Bntton, to my dismay, under Spharoma versus 

 ^pnmrdcea, accedes to the proposition that this is wisely 

 ctone.^ It 18 one of the grossest violations of the fundamental 

 principle that an author must never make another say what 



