2S0 PITTONIA. 



of iiUerdictiug even the "ascertaining" of the genera of the 

 ancients, I protested, Mr. Heraslej^'s sole comment upon my 

 citing Catullus, Pliny and Theophrastus is an emphatic one, 

 namelvj an exclamation point. That is really very severe. But 

 an answer^ to him, and to any others who are in elementary 

 stages of acquaintance with these matters^ was in print prior 

 to his exclamation point. It begins at page 195 of this volume. 

 But Dr. Scumann, who dwells in a country where men are 

 permitted to "ascertain" if they will, the part that ancient 

 authors really play in modern generic nomenclature, is also a 

 little unfortunate in his allusion to ''Americans " as the people 

 "in whom dwells a sense of justice so delicate that they cite 

 Ovid and Virgil." I have but a very brief though twofold 

 reply to make this, I am the only American who has credited 

 genera to classic Greek and Roman writers, in so far as my 

 knowledge goes, and I shall be under obligations to Dr. Schu- 

 mann if he will tell me where I have made Ovid the author 

 of a genus. But the part of my answer which is especially 

 pertinent to him, as being a German, is, that the valued hand- 

 book of references— the first volume one naturally takes up 

 when wishing to begin the w-ork of ascertaining w^ho is the 

 real author of a genus— is the German Sprengel's edition of 

 Linna:His' Genera Plantarum. None but a German has, to my 

 knowledge, been through the whole list of " Linnr^us' " genera 

 and given tlie true authors of them from Hippocrates and 

 Theophrastus down to those who flourished in the thirtieth 

 year of the nineteenth century; while among living authors 

 who cite the ancients for classic genera (at least parenthetic- 

 ally), I may name, as being one of the most accomplished 

 men who have served botanical science in the last half-century, 



Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, also a German, by birth and 

 early training. 



An unhappy feature of Dr. Kuntze's work, and one in vin- 

 dication of whicli I can say nothhig, is his method of con- 

 structing new names for genera. Perhaps in some distant 

 century, when self-repeating history may have brouglit the 

 return of the times when scientists were mostly men of clear 



