The American Midland Naturalist 



PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY THE UNIVERSITY 

 OF NOTRE DAME, NOTRE DAME, INDIANA. 



VOL. III. JULY, 1913. NO. 4. 



Certain Violet Names. 



By EDWARD I,. GREENE. 



The rather copious literature of violets which for several 

 years past has occupied much space in several botanical journals 

 of New York and Boston must have been unsatisfactory and 

 even dull reading to as many botanists — they are very many, 

 and scattered all over the country — who are interested in violets 

 in the field, as nature there presents them; also I doubt that any 

 considerable number of botanists, ot whatever degrees of pro- 

 ficiency in knowledge of the plants, have found pages of guesses 

 about hybrid origins, and high sounding theorizings about Men- 

 delian laws, able to hold their very serious attention. By way of 

 variety there is now given us a paper of considerable length on 

 some aspects of the violet question that to the writer of the paper 

 seem to have been too long neglected. Its leading points are 

 nomenclatorial. This paper is from the facile pen of Mr. Eugene 

 Bicknell of New York, and of course is far as possible from being 

 dull, or uninstructive.^ Nevertheless, the man of the facile pen, 

 if proceeding in the name of science, may well be advised to pause, 

 now and then, look up a page of some old volume — or one not 

 so old — and see that his pen tells always the exact truth; for 

 nothing else has permanent place in any science. 



On the matter of Viola ohliqua the first statement of my 

 friend is that " The name seems first to have emerged into the 

 modern light in the Illustrated Flora." It seems to have been 

 entirely forgotten here, that the name V. ohliqua had "emerged 

 into the modern light" as early as 1886 — ten or eleven years 

 before Mr. Bicknell's date of the "emergence" — in the Botanical 

 Gazette, the man who presented it to the botanical public being 



' Viola obliqua Hill, and other Violets. Bull. Torr. Bot. Club, vol. 40, 

 pp. 261-270. June, 1913. 



