REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS. 119 
reckoned. Professor MacMillan has thrown no new light upon 
this subject. On the contrary, by diverting himself and his 
readers with an ingenious sophism, he has the more obscured 
it. That assumed parallelism between the reckoning of 
longitude on the earth’s surface, and the reckoning of his- 
torical priority in biological nomenclature, does not exist. 
Whether that of Paris, or that of Greenwich, or any other, 
be chosen for the zero meridian of longitude, involves no 
questions of absolute truth and right; makes nothing for or 
against injustice to scientific men; does not affect historic 
trathfulness, or literary accuracy. Thus at least three of the 
most weighty considerations that regulate human actions 
—justice, truthfulness, right—while failing to have the least 
bearing upon the starting point for longitudes, are in con- 
tact with the subject of botanical nomenclature at every 
point. The two cases are about as far as possible from being 
parallel; and our friend’s unfortunate statement, “An arbi- 
trary starting point must be determined for botanical names, 
just as an arbitrary point of latitude or longitude is deter- 
mined” (p. 14), seems to have betrayed him into making a 
concession such as we should have expected only from the 
opposite side in this controversy, and the extreme of it, too; 
never from one who thought himself to be defending the 
cause of “strict priority; for on page 15, speaking to the point 
of what book and date shall be adopted as initial for plant 
nomenclature, he says: “It becomes a matter of preference, 
to be determined as far as possible in the light of convenience 
and custom.” ; 
If all that we knew of the mind of our author respecting 
nomenclature were the above sentence, linked to his proposi- 
tion that the point of departure for genera must be chosen 
arbitrarily, we should look for his name on the list of those 
who have subscribed to the Berlin Protest. 
But notwithstanding this very conciliatory if not compro- 
mising sentence which I have quoted, in practice the author 
makes no compromise with the pleaders for the usual and 
convenient; for in no new book that has appeared since Otto 
