The American Midland Naturalist 
PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY THE UNIVERSITY 
OF NOTRE DAME, NOTRE DAME, INDIANA. 
VOL. II. SEPTEMBER, 1911. NOs." 
SOME LINNA‘AN TRIVIAL NAMES. 
By J. A. NIEUWLAND. 
About Linnzeus and botanical nomenclature several notions pre- 
vail here in the beginning of the twentieth century which botanists 
of a hundred years since had scarcely heard, and which would have 
been promptly objected to and dismissed as bad if they had been 
offered for acceptance. One such notion is that Linnzeus invented 
and established a system of what is now commonly called binomial 
nomenclature; a scheme by which each plant species should be 
known by a single generic name of one word and a specific name of 
one word, so that there should be but two words to a name. 
That Linneus made no such law or that if he did, he neither 
said so nor carried it into effect, is sufficiently shown by the 
following list of names which consist not of two words, but of three, 
all these occurring in that work, the Species Plantarum, in which 
we are told that he put this binomial scheme into practice. Sup- 
posing this claim to be well founded, it is curious that our botanical 
forefathers of a hundred or even a hundred and fifty years ago and 
more, living as they did some of them contemporaneously with 
him, others active within the first quarter of a century after him, 
knew nothing of such a claim, should have felt themselves so often 
called upon to alter Linnzean species names either by exclusion of 
one of the words of the 97 ternary names, or using their freedom in 
suppressing such names altogether, supplanting them by others of 
one word totally new. 
Or supposing that such botanists of a hundred years since and 
more, approved, as a suggestion, the short and handy trivial names, 
it is certain that scores of them treated Linnzan nomenclature as 
they did that of others, like a thing subject to amendment and 
improvement, and so there were a hundred and forty years or so 
~* September 15, 1911, pages 97 to 128. 
