CLASSIFICATION AND NOMENCLATURE. 43 



as " Leather-leaf Polypody " for Polypodium Scouleri, " Mr. 

 Goldie's Shield-fern " for Dryopteris Goldieana, nomenclature is 

 made cumbrous instead of simple. 



1 i 4. The Linnsean system, however, did not prove entirely 

 stable. In the early days when communication among botanists 

 was not easy, the same plant would be described independently 

 by two botanists under different names. Or, in other cases, 

 two botanists would independently establish a certain generic 

 group under different names. For example, Swartz separated a 

 group of plants under the name Botrychium which Linnaeus 

 had included in Osmunda, leaving the latter name for the species 

 we now know under that name. In the same year, and in fact 

 in an article immediately following that of Swartz, Bernhardi 

 separated the same two genera, but left the Botrychium species 

 under the name Osmunda, and took the true Osmunda species 

 out under the name Struthopteris. But errors of this kind were 

 not the worst that existed. Botanists frequently cancelled good 

 names that already existed, and deliberately substituted some of 

 their own. Lamarck in 1797 called one of our Southern fern 

 allies Osmunda bitemata ; in 1803 Richard called it Botrypus 

 lunarioides, recognizing it as belonging to a genus distinct 

 from Osmunda and unaware of the establishment of the genus 

 Botrychium by Swartz. When Swartz in 1806 published the 

 first manual of all known ferns * he properly transferred this 

 species to his own earlier named genus Botrychium, but instead 

 of adopting the oldest specific name he adopted the later one 

 and called this fern Botrychium hinarioides. Willdenow enu- 

 merated the ferns known to him in iSiot and quoted all three of 

 these names, but rebaptized the plant as Botrychiitmfumarioides. 

 Sprengel, seventeen years later, quoted all these names, includ- 

 ing that of Willdenow, and gave the plant still another name, 

 Botrychitwi fumarice. It will thus be seen that the period of 

 eruption in nomenclature was in the early part of the century 

 instead of the later, and largely on account of these early 

 irregularities of procedure we have recently been undergoing 

 something of an upheaval of nomenclature. 



* Synopsis Filicum, 1806. 

 t Species Plantarum, vol. 5. 



