164 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



This letter has given botanists a lot of trouble to 

 decide what, in justice, the Big Tree should be called 

 in scientific terms. The law of priority requires 

 that the name given by the first correct describer of 

 a plant should be accepted, unless that name has al- 

 ready been used in describing another. Unfortu- 

 nately, it seems that the name Sequoia gigantea had 

 once been proposed for the redwood. This fact had 

 the effect among nomenclatural sticklers of dis- 

 crediting the same name when given by Decaisne to 

 the Big Tree, although in the meantime the redwood 

 had come to be called Sequoia sempervirens. As a 

 consequence, in the view of orthodoxy, and in ac- 

 cordance with a description published in 1855 by 

 one Seeman, the tree should be Sequoia Welling- 

 tonia; and so it is called in Sargent's authoritative 

 "Silva of North America." 



Dr. Winslow's letter, however, proposing Wash- 

 ingtonia Calif ornica, antedates Seeman by a year; 

 and had his description been couched in technical 

 language and published in a botanical journal, in- 

 stead of being merely a contribution to a country 

 newspaper, it would have had an unquestioned 

 standing at court, which it now lacks. Nevertheless, 

 "Winslow has some friends, among them the den- 

 drologist, G. B. Sudworth, author of a work on the 

 "Trees of the Pacific Coast," published by the 



