44 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
the Brongniartian and modern use are too far from being equiv- 
alents when viewed taxonomically. 
Passing now to the third line of the page as given above, 
one may well be surprised that this man of more than a half- 
century ago, the contemporary of Hooker, Bentham, Endlicher, 
Parlatroe and Asa Gray declines to adopt the old and familiar 
ordinal name Coniferae, and substitutes the much later, indeed 
the comparatively recent name Pinaceae. Confronted here at 
the outset by this ‘‘aceae’’ ordinal name in place of the old one, 
Coaiferae, the thoughtful reader will turn a few pages enquiringly 
to see whether Bubani in his old age was captivated by the very 
new fancy that these designations of orders—families, as we 
now say—are to be taken up not according to priority, but in 
deference to their ending with acEAE. The enquirer will not turn 
many pages before ascertaining that the venerable author of 
this Flora had no such thought. With him, family names may 
‘terminate in almost any sort of a way, as if in complete indifference 
to the new fancy about uniformity; and these, like all other 
names of groups high or low, mostly stand or fall with him accord- 
ing to priority. But why, then, Pinaceae instead of Coniferae? 
I do not know; but my guess would be that fault is found with 
the term Coniferae as inapplicable because untruthful. In the 
order, as received by Bubani—and indeed by all authors—only a 
very insignificant proportion of the trees bear fruits approaching 
the cone-shaped. The firs bear cylinders, the spruces bear ovals 
as do the larches and many more. Cypresses have spherical 
fruits, while those of junipers are spherical and berry-like, and 
a number of genera yield fleshy one-seeded fruits as far from the 
cone-like as plums or olives are. Only certain pines, and by no 
means all of them, bear fruits more or less cone-like, while not one 
of them is veritably a cone in shape. Bubani we shall find to 
represent that school of nomenclators—in the long run, the 
strongly predominant school—who hold that in science no falsity 
must be tolerated, even in a name. This, I say, is my surmise 
as to his reason for abandoning the use of the familiar designation 
Coniferae, which also is much older than we should have believed; 
for Bubani in his bibliography of the Order as such finds the 
term Coniferae to have been used by his countryman Bellonius 
who, in the year 1533, in a treatise on these trees calls them by 
that group name, 
