BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE. 379 



Dicentra on the ground that the right word /cerrpov, and not 

 the impossible word Kkvrpov, must have been intended by 

 Borckkausen, we think it should now be maintained, although 

 it might have been left in the original form. Moreover, the 

 doctrine that names must not be mended and that sense is un- 

 important, however good and needful, is so recent that it must 

 not be too rigidly applied to long-standing cases. 



This consideration should not be wholly overlooked in the 

 case of old and long-established genera, especially those of 

 numerous species for which some obscure older name has 

 come to light. Since it is impossible to make rules for the 

 infraction of a rule, such cases must be left to sound discre- 

 tion. In our opinion such discretion would forbid the trans- 

 ference of the name Stylidium from Swartz's genus to Marlea, 

 and the revival of Labillardiere's transient first Candollea for 

 Swartz's Stylidium. 



The fourth section of article GO, which enjoined the rejec- 

 tion " of names formed by the combination of two languages," 

 is now suppressed. Nothing is put in its place ; but let 

 us hope that we shall not be driven to the acceptance of the 

 specific name " acuticarpum " which one of our fellow-bota- 

 nists has recently perpetrated. Although hybrid names are 

 to be avoided, yet, as De Candolle remarks, they cannot con- 

 sistently be outlawed by people who accept " centimetre," 

 " decimetre," " bureaucracy," " terminology," and the like, nor 

 by botanists who raise no objection to " ranunculoides," 

 " scirpoides," " linnseoides," " bauhinioides," etc. 



Names of identical meaning but of different orthography, 

 as our author insists, may well enough co-exist. In a vast 

 genus it might be neither inconvenient nor harmful to main- 

 tain species named respectively " fluviorum," " fluvialis," and 

 " fluviatilis," at least if they belonged to different parts of 

 the world. 



We pass to some brief annotations upon the second part 

 of the publication before us, which deals with questions not 

 taken up by the congress of 1867. 



The first topic is that of the nomenclature of organs, which 

 was treated with some fullness in the " Phytographie." The 



