14 CAROLUS LINN&US 



the language of a certain social caste, and the 

 language of almost all authorship, the canons 

 of good taste seemed to require that the 

 author of a book in Latin should put his name 

 in Latin on the title page, and not in some 

 barbaric Teutonian or Russian or Scandina- 

 vian or English form to which, as to a plebian 

 inheritance, he might chance to have been 

 born. Such is the origin of the general cir- 

 cumstance, familiar to all botanists, that nearly 

 all the thousands of volumes of botanical 

 literature that antedate the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century are by authors whose 

 names are plainly Latin names. The same is 

 true of the earlier literature of all our sciences. 

 It was all in Latin; and the authors' names 

 are Latin names. 



The greatest name in astronomy, but for 

 the man's Latinization of it on the title page 

 of his immortal book, would have come down 

 to posterity as Kupernik. But all astron- 

 omers, and all other people besides, should 

 be grateful that, the book being in Latin, he 

 wrote himself not Kupernik but Copernicus. 

 The most illustrious of old-time Chinese sages 

 was and is known to his countrymen as 

 Kung-fu-tsee; but the Latin scholars who, 

 some centuries ago, first brought him to the 



