1895. ] The Nomenclature Question. 371 
not the remotest thought of its being applied to the Madison 
gathering, and I can scarcely see how my critic can maintain 
that my words have the compromising purport which he 
ascribes to them. Certainly the ‘‘List” has not received the 
formal sanction of the Madison conference, for the simple rea- 
son that it was not published, nor in great part even written, 
until long after the Madison meeting, so that no one, who 
gave my statement a moment’s thought could have read into 
it any slur upon the members of the Madison convention. It 
is a well-known and generally established custom for assem- 
blies of all sorts to refer work to committees, but the results 
of such work cannot be said to have received the formal sanc- 
tion of the body until the committee has made its report, and 
the report has been accepted. 
hile Mr. Coville’s examples of the doctrine of homonyms 
are lucid, the felicitous effect of that theorem is not yet ap- 
parent to all. The case may be presented in the following 
somewhat modified form. When it is found that a valid spe- 
cies has by chance received the same name as an older defunct 
one, relegated to synonymy, the former is, according to the 
doctrine of homonyms, to have its name changed at once, 
while according to the usage now prevalent in all foreign 
countries and among a number of our own botanists, such a 
valid species would be allowed to retain its name until there 
was a practical reason for changing it. This reason could in 
general only be the revival of the older homonym as a good 
species, which would certainly not occur oftener than once-in 
four or five times, so that there would in most cases be no 
occasion for change at all. That the former course, which 
makes a host of premature changes many of which need never 
be made, is conducive to greater stability is, to say the least, 
not self-evident. Mr. Coville advocates immediate renaming 
in case of all such homonyms for the rather singular reason 
that future specialists doing critical work may not have to 
disturb nomenclature. But would it not be safer to entrust 
such changes to the specialist when he has in due time demon- 
strated that they are necessary than to the enthusiastic 
reformer, whose basis of action is only a theory of botanical 
anguage as yet endorsed only by a small part of the active 
botanists of the world? Certainly we should scarcely need 
a better example of the difference between the theoretical 
and practical in nomenclature, a distinction already brought 
out in the recently published recommendations and quite clear 
to many of our American botanists. —B. L. ROBINSON. 
