366 REVIEWS. 



in the " Proclromus," it seems to us retrograde and unadvis- 

 able to have gone back in the new " Genera Plantarum " to 

 Saxifnif/ecv, and the like ; and this upon no obvious prin- 

 ciple, as we have jSamydacece, Oornacece, etc., brought into 

 harmony with the rule. And if in the " Prodromus " we 

 have Sti/)'acacece, why not also Salicacece f And if, in the 

 " Genera Plantarum," Styrax could take the acece termina- 

 tion as Sti/racece, why not as Styracacece ? If it be objected 

 that some such terminations have an unclassical aspect, this 

 objection applies all the more to the cases under our second 

 remark : Xamely, that too rigid adherence to the rule that 

 names of suborders, tribes, etc., shall end in -ece and the like, 

 gives us nearly unpronounceable words of four or five con- 

 secutive vowels, or, when the diphthongs are printed in sepa- 

 rate letters, according to a prevalent fashion, one or two 

 more. Of these — the diphthongs written out — Sauraujeac, 

 Spiraeeae, Cateshaeeae^ Jaumeeae^ Thymleeeae^ and Moraeeae 

 are the worst instances, and would justify any infraction of 

 rules.^ The last, and one of the worst, would have been 

 avoided by writing the ordinal name IridacecE when that of 

 the tribe would have been Iridcoe. Names are to be spoken 

 as well as read, and botanists who have to teach think more 

 of these things than those who only write. 



At the head of his remarks upon generic names (art. 25 

 et seq.), our author commends to other naturalists the very 

 clear directions given in the rules for Zoological Nomencla- 

 ture, edited by Dall, for rendering Greek letters into Latin 

 in the construction of generic and specific names. He notes, 

 however, that the rendering of -7 by e is not in full accordance 

 with Latin usage, as witness hihiiotheca, dialectica, Hecuhea^ 

 etc. 



1 Far better to write SpirceacecE, with De CandoUe. The use of this 

 termination for tribal names need not be objected to by those who take 

 little pains to use it for orders. And those of us who are careful so to 

 employ it, would prefer its occasional use for tribes and suborders to the 

 concatenation of vowels, which it is not easy to write and almost impos- 

 sible to pronounce. Some quite unnecessary tribal names in acece, such as 

 Vernoniacece and Eupatoriacece, adopted by De Candolle from Lessing, are 

 kept up, although exceptional. 



