8o AMERICAN MIDLAND NAtURAUST 



Asa Gray. Its right of priority was as clearly shown there as 

 it was ten years later in the Illustrated Flora. He did not believe 

 in the enforcement oi the law of priority in cases of that kind. 

 The name V. cucullata, in his view, had been too long in place 

 in all the nineteenth-century books to be now displaced. Now, 

 first of all men to take up that name V. ohliqua, after Dr. Gray's 

 intimation, and place it on a printed page heading a paragraph, 

 and as the possibly available name for the most common of 

 Potomac Valley violets — I say first of them am I ; yet Mr. Bick- 

 nell, apparently through failure to distinguish between two ideas 

 that are nevertheless very distinct, now whites me down as the 

 most successful of all who have assailed the name V. obliqua. 

 The principal paragraph of his first page opens thus: "More 

 redoubtably than any other writer, more picturesquely. Dr. Greene 

 has used his slings and arrows against this name." Mr. Bicknell 

 appears as having failed to distinguish between things so dis- 

 similar as the name of a plant and the figure purporting to repre- 

 sent the plant. I should say that the name of a plant is one 

 thing, the verbal description of the plant another thing, and a 

 picture of it a third thing. I have inveighed against the figure 

 of V. ohliqua given by Hill, but nowhere against the name; and 

 so I suppose that what Mr. Bicknell had in mind would have 

 found happier expression if before writing he had looked again 

 to see whether it was a name or a picture that I had spoken against. 

 I am sure that I nowhere wrote against both. A more curious 

 passage in Mr. Bicknell is this: "His onslaught — surely not to 

 be withstood — finally by a hair's breadth evades a fatal issue. 

 With fine dexterity the all but destroyed thing has been rescued 

 and, on the instant, sent forth with now well established rights — 

 for how shall it ever again be assailed with better success?" Here 

 I seem to observe that the writer has now, right in the midst of 

 his paragraph, a new topic; at least one quite distinct from that 

 which he began. He has now joined together the name and the 

 plant. It seems to be affirmed that I had now, at one place, 

 established well the name V. ohliqua as connected with a certain 

 type. This is a more inexcusable misconstruction of me than 

 the other, if there is any difTerence. There has been entirely 

 eliminated from my page, in Mr. Bickncll's thought, that inter- 

 rogation mark. The first thing I wrote on that page which has 

 elicited so nuich and such pleasing comment was " v. obuqua, 



