SOME LINNASAN TRIVIAL NAMES 99 
been dead a hundred years, almost all his three-worded ‘‘ specific 
names ’’ had disappeared from nomenclature. Very few could be 
found in manuals of botany or anywhere else for that matter. 
There was Alisma Plantago, Veronica Anagallis, Asplenium 
Ruta-muraria, Panicum Crus-galli, and the like, and all credited to 
Linneeus, and falsely ; for to connect two of Linnzean names by a 
hyphen is to convert the words into one. It is to make for him a 
binary name where he had a ternary one. Linnzeus could not have 
perpetrated such a falsification of history as to have written Adlisma 
Plantago-aquatica. ‘That expression would have been in his view 
worse than needless. The plant had been known for centuries as 
Plantago aquatica simply, and it was that old name precisely which 
he wished to preserve. He would not have written in his syn- 
onymy Plantago-aquatica Camerarius, because neither Camerarius 
nor any one else could have been found to present the name in the 
form of a compound word. 
Now in recent years when it has been found that ternary names are 
very frequent in Linnzus, botanists play on their own minds the trick, 
and thereby deceive themselves, and falsify to the unwary, who take 
their word for it, that AUisma Plantago-aquatica is a Linnean name, 
which it is not. The hyphen is a harmless looking mark, almost 
meaningless, yet is not quite so. Its office is to make two words over 
into one, and by the strength of its littleness people convert nearly 
a hundred ternary names into binaries, and then credit them to 
Linneus. We make for Linnzus some ninety-seven new names 
that he never thought of, give them to him, and then argue from 
these of our own making that Linnzus laid down a law making 
names strictly binary, and carried it into effect. We enact for 
him a law of which he knew nothing and then pretend that he 
both made and kept it. That is the reasoning of us hyphenators. 
Linnzeus did indeed sometimes connect two terms of a name by a 
hyphen. The first name in our list is so made; but even the 
hyphenated name as made by him, to his contemporaries and to 
later authors was as objectionable as the unhyphenated, and they 
suppressed that kind and made new ones in place of them just as 
unhesitatingly as they did the others; and for the purpose of show- 
ing that we insert some such in our list. 
There is abroad in the atmosphere of these early twentieth 
century days a spirit of the absolute immutability of specific 
names. All the younger members of the botanical fraternity have 
