294 COMPOUND 



A great and just complaint has arisen in my time 

 among the cultivators of botany, who found the names 

 of many garden plants, with which they had long been 

 conversant, altered for others without any apparent 

 cause, and in many instances for the worse ; as Aristo- 

 lochia macrophylla, an excellent and expressive name, 

 for a very unappropriate one, A. Slpho. For this I arn 

 obliged to censure my much regretted and very intelli- 

 gent friend L'Heritier. When he came to England to 

 reap the rich harvest of our undescribed plants, he 

 paid no respect to the generic or specific names by 

 which Dr. Solander or others had called them, because 

 those names were not printed ; but he indulged him- 

 self, and perhaps thought he confirmed his own im- 

 portance, by contriving new ones ; a factitious mode 

 of gaining celebrity, to which his talents ought to have 

 been infinitely superior. Nor would it have been easy 

 to say how far this inconvenient plan of innovation 

 might have extended, -had not the Plortus Kewensis 

 come forth to secure our remaining property. 



I have only to add a few words respecting a kind of 

 generic names that has of late become more common 

 than Limiseus probably would have approved, though 

 he has once or twice allowed it : I allude to those com- 

 pounded either of two established names, or of one 

 combined with any other word. Of the former number 

 is Calamagrostis, formed of Calamus and Agrostis, 

 two Linnaean names ; and this is no where sanctioned 

 by any good authority. Happily the genus to which it 



