448 CORRESPONDENCE. [1858, 
view curious facts of distribution, etc., and lay out a 
set for the Kew herbarium. How true it is, as you 
intimated, that the interchange in northern hemi- 
sphere has mainly been via Asia. 
T heartily admire your “ Handbook,” and await with 
great interest your paper growing out of it; your 
experience is so great and your judgment so sound. 
As to English nomenclature, we can only approxi- 
mate to a good system; the practical difficulties are 
too great, often insurmountable. It seems to me you 
hit the happy medium, if we must needs have popular 
name of the genus coéxtensive with the Latin one; 
but I rather doubt the advisability of that, and would 
use sub-generic popular names for generic, I think. 
Though “I do not much like” the whole thing, yet 
somebody must attend to English nomenclature, for 
better or worse; so I am glad you took it up. 
I hope you will study perigynous and epigynous. 
As to ovary, which, putting the important part for 
the whole, we have learned to use in place of pistil, it 
certainly is perfectly novel to me to hear the name 
applied to the gynecium of Ranunculus. I am confi- 
dent the word is never so used in De Candolle or 
Endlicher. I do not recall any instance of your using 
the word in any such sense; I am sure I never did. 
Where the fact of the combination is doubtful or am- 
biguous, if I said ovary, that would infer the combi- 
nation ; if ovaries, the distinctness. In Apocynaceze 
A. De Candolle steadily writes ovarium or ovaria, 
according to the nature of the case. Per contra, you 
might as well eall the column of Malva a stamen! For 
the collective term, I wish, in your paper, you would go 
for restoring to use the Linnean term pistillum, asa 
against the habit of using ovarium in a double sense, 
hail ta i ac 
Rp yt een eae 
ce ae i ga 
