62 AMERICAN FERN JOURNAL 
Some time ago, there appeared in Science a very 
sensible letter from Prof. Clute on common and sci- 
entific names of plants. The moral of it—and a very 
good moral, too, is, in substance, this: that the demand 
among amateurs for English names and nothing but 
English names has much in it that is unreasonable 
and even hurtful to the study of botany. Among 
common names, the same one is often used for different 
plants and different ones for the same plant, so much 
so that they are, as a class, hopelessly inexact just 
where precision is a prime requisite. Latin names were 
expressly designed for exact reference and though botan- 
ical usage is not yet wholly uniform, fulfill their purpose 
very well. Nor are they so hard to learn and remember 
as the beginner is apt to suppose, forgetting that he 
has already assimilated a good many of them, such 
as aster, geranium, rhododendron, chrysanthemum and 
the like. Moreover, the attempt to create a sufficient 
supply of English names by simply making them up, 
one for each species, has not proved a shining success. 
Wherefore, though English names that have really 
grown up in popular usage are by no means to be ne- 
glected, pupils should be taught and amateurs brought 
to understand that scientific names have a real reason 
for existence, and should be used. 
All this strikes the present writer as in general very 
good, indeed. Nevertheless, ferns may be, to some 
extent, an exception. Next to birds, they seem to 
have the greatest attraction for the beginner and ama- 
teur in natural history, whose way may properly be 
made as easy as is consistent with scientific exactness. 
’ Perhaps this might be facilitated if, in teaching, the Latin names were 
more often translated for the benefit of a generation which will not learn 
tin. It might help to know that Polypodium and Pteris and Crypto- 
gramma are not mere arbitrary sounds, but mean “many-footed’’ and 
““a wing” and “ en line” and all refer to some quality of the plant to 
which they are applied. 
