48 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
are forms rather than species; moreover, the author knows that 
the name he adopts has not priority, and says that they who prefer 
to do so may use the name P. Salzmanni which, as he shows, 
is six years older. Equally characteristic of the author is his 
amendment of the name imposed by La Peyrouse, who had it 
Pyrenaica rather than Pyrenaea; and he defends himself in this 
course by a terse and vigorous Latin paragraph which in English 
would run thus: 
“The word Pyrenaicum, of bad latinity, I have altered to 
Pyrenaeum, following Caius Julius Caesar, and also Pliny, and in 
sheer contempt of the folly of those who not only will not improve 
a piece of bad Latin diction, but refuse to tolerate any kind of 
correction in a name.” 
A few pages beyond the pines occurs another change as to a 
familiar specific adjective, the author’s reason for which is stated 
as definitely. The case is that of the type species of the ancient 
genus Taxus; which genus, having been known for ages as a 
monotype, needed no specific name, and had none until Linnaeus 
called it Taxus baccata. Bubani’s line introductory to the discussion 
of the new tree reads thus: 
Taxus baccifera (Theophr., Diosc., Virg., C. J. Caesar, 
Nicand., Galen, etc). 
Since the authors parenthetically named have nothing to 
do with this matter of nomenclature, they who adopt the new 
binary name will write it simply Taxus baccifera, Bubani. But 
why this amendment of the Linnaean name? He gives answer 
that it represents an altogether mistaken use of the adjective 
baccata. A baccate thing is a thing made of berries, as for example 
the strings of bead-like read berries with which women belonging 
to races not yet civilized have been wont to adorn themselves; 
and the woman thus adorned was a baccata, yet the tree or plant 
yielding berries is as invariably a baccifera. 
I should like to carry Bubani’s argument a little further, by 
noting that Linneaus seems to have hit upon the right adjective 
when he named a certain shrub Myrica certfera, and that had he 
made it Myrica cerata, he would still have been employing a 
e 
good Latin adjective—the exact parallel to his Taxus baccata— . 
but would have made an absurd use of it; for the Latins would 
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