OUR LAW MAKERS. 



As long as there are botanical institutions with "axes to grind," 

 and as long as there are men who like to pose as authorities and make 

 "laws" or "rules," as they call them, for others, so long will we have 

 our Botanical "law makers." ' However, they have about the same 

 power to enforce these laws as have stage policemen, and the whole 

 subject is very much on the order of opera bouffe. 



The botanical "law maker" is a very familiar, but at present a 

 somewhat discredited type in America. We have in America (unfor- 

 tunately) two factions or rival cliques of botanists that love each other 

 as do the French and Germans. One faction has been very busy 

 for the past eight or ten years making their "laws" and scolding every- 

 body who did not approve of them. They have been exceedingly 

 and perniciously active. After they had carried matters with a higji 

 hand in America for a number of years, they thought they would 

 work the same plan on a more extended scale. So they went in full 

 force to Vienna. But the Germans had their own "axes to grind," 

 and when they had finished our American law makers were the worst 

 defeated crowd that ever got beaten at their own game. They did 

 have strength enough left to whip up a few stragglers at Philadelphia 

 and "secede," but I think they are heartily sick of the law-making 

 business. It is to be hoped, and to a degree expected, that now 

 American botany will have a little much needed rest on that subject 

 from this quarter. 



But the other faction is now trying the same plan and methods 

 and has appointed an agent as their chief steerer and wire puller. 

 He probably is of the opinion that he is directing things, but botanical 

 laws are always cut and dried affairs and the men with axes rarely 

 show their hands. Some one is necessarily singled .out to turn the 

 grindstone, but it is to be observed that the other two American 

 members decline to be used for that purpose. 



Our trouble in America is purely an American quarrel, and, like 

 the Kilkenny cats, we should be left to fight it out among ourselves, 

 without involving the Europeans. 



But that is not the plan. In order to make it appear that there 

 is an international demand for "laws" for nomenclature of crypto- 

 grams, a few prominent men in European mycology, such as Bresadola, 

 Patouillard, and Massee, have been appointed as a committee to formu- 

 late these "laws." These men are mycologists. They are interested 

 in their own work and are too much engaged to waste their time 

 making "laws" either to regulate nomenclature or to regulate the 

 wind, one of which is just as practicable as the other. The use of 

 their names, in one instance at least, and I suspect in all, was un- 

 authorized, and jafit:.<^ne of the three, I am told, will have anything to 



428 



