86 BOTANY 



of some learned society, and riot yet reproduced in the 

 published general floras. To discover this, application 

 would have to be made to some specialist at Kew or 

 the British Museum. If the plant is unknown to them 

 it is almost certain to be really a new species. The 

 discoverer is then at liberty, indeed it is his duty, to 

 describe and publish figures of it, and with this original 

 description it must be named. Now, as we saw at the 

 beginning, this imaginary flower is so like the violets 

 that it must not be put in the genus Viola. The species 

 name should be selected to give some indication of the 

 nature of the plant. The red- veined leaves and the red 

 spots along the petal nerves are very characteristic, 

 and so a good name would be rubrinervis. In the 

 future the violet would be known as Viola rubrinervis 

 Smith, after the Mr. Smith we can imagine having 

 discovered and described this new flower. In giving the 

 species a name one most important point must be 

 observed, and that is that no other Viola from any part 

 of the world has that same species name. The con- 

 fusion this would cause is obvious, and so one of the 

 strictest rules followed by all systematists is that no 

 new plant shall have a name already appropriated by 

 another in the same genus, and if, unwitting, an author 

 gives such a name, it shall immediately be superseded 

 and renamed. To assist botanists in this there is a 

 monumental work called the Index Kewensis, in which 

 all the specific names ever given to plants are recorded 

 with all their synonyms. 



New species may merely swell the numbers of new 

 forms known to systematists, or they may be import- 

 ant clues in the incomplete scheme of evolution. Some- 

 times in the latter sense some of the numerically smaller 

 families are of the greatest interest. For instance, 



