BOTANICAL NAMES AND THE 

 AUTHORITIES FOR THEM. 



THE necessity for giving in abbreviation the name of 

 the botanist who is responsible for the name of a plant 

 naturally seems, to the uninitiated, a waste of space 

 and of printer's ink, and a brief explanation is therefore 

 necessary. The necessity arises from the fact that the 

 same name in many cases has been applied by different 

 botanists to different plants, in ignorance that the name 

 had already been given to some other plant ; or cases 

 have occurred in which a botanist has confused two 

 different plants and described them as one plant, in 

 which case some subsequent botanist with a wider 

 knowledge and a more critical eye has had to separate 

 them, so that the name first used no longer represents 

 the plant accurately. 



Under these circumstances, when, for instance, the 

 same name has been used for five different plants, if 

 the bare name were given without that of the botanist 

 who applied it to the particular plant, it would be im- 

 possible to be sure which of the five plants the writer 

 meant, and in a pharmacopoeia or work on medicinal 

 plants, giving the name of the plant alone, would lead 

 to endless confusion, and probably to unexpected results. 

 The reason for abbreviating the names is to save space, 

 and because at any botanical library the librarian would 

 easily be able to trace the name in Pritzel's Thesaurus 

 Literature Botanica, up to 1877 (^ e vear m which it 



