September 15, 1905.] 



SCIENCE, 



339 



and new species of plants will not, with them, 

 obtain recognition as published, unless the 

 diagnoses of them be in Latin. 



This ruling of the Vienna congress has 

 quite startled the botanical public on our side 

 of the Atlantic, if one may judge by the com- 

 ments one hears ; and the present writer, being 

 one who has published many new generic 

 propositions, and an exceedingly long list of 

 species, all in English — and next to none at 

 all in Latin — has already been asked repeat- 

 edly for his opinion as to this regulation. 



Now as to the fact of its having come to us 

 as a surprise, I think that our twentieth-cen- 

 tury generation botanist is the only one to 

 whom such a resolution would have come as 

 a surprise. Anyhow, all of us who are fa- 

 miliar with the work of the great American 

 botanists of the last half of the nineteenth 

 century know that with them — Torrey, Engel- 

 mann. Gray, Tuckermann and sever,al lesser 

 names — the descriptions of their new genera 

 and species were published in Latin; the only 

 exceptional instances being those of their 

 coming upon new types in the course of the 

 publication of books and manuals intended 

 primarily for the use of an English-speaking 

 public, and in which only a few of the genera 

 and species were new. And if we go back to 

 still earlier generations we find that even the 

 whole flora of North America, when done in 

 book form, was done in Latin, as to the es- 

 sential characters of all the genera and all 

 the species, both old and new. Need one 

 name Walter's ' Flora Caroliniana,' Michaux's, 

 Pursh's and Hooker's immortal classics on 

 the botany of an English-speaking land? 



And the reason is readily manifest. Latin 

 is, and has always been, the official language 

 of systematic botany; the one and only lan- 

 guage which all systematic botanists are sup- 

 posed to be able to read and understand. It 

 is our universal medium of expression. It is, 

 therefore, hardly reasonable to expect that im- 

 portant contributions shall obtain wide recog- 

 nition unless given in that official language. 

 Or, if that seem too dogmatic, disputed it can 

 not be, that a botanical book, or page, or para- 

 graph published in Latin obtains at least a 

 much wider and more general publication 



than it can attain to in any other language. 

 This is why every great standard of taxonomy, 

 at present, as through the past, is sure to be 

 in Latin. But, as has been intimated, every 

 extension of a plant genus, and every attempt 

 to indicate and circumscribe a new group, is 

 an important item, a new landmark, so to 

 speak, in the progress of botany; and if im- 

 portant, the character should be given in 

 Latin. Botanists, one and all, and to the 

 ends of the earth, seem to me to have the right 

 to demand this. 



I have within the last decade heard now 

 and then a complaint made by one and an- 

 other of my American colleagues, that in 

 Europe, and especially on the continent, due 

 recognition has not been given to our con- 

 tributions to taxonomy; and I have sympa- 

 thized; but within the last two years, in the 

 course of correspondence, it has become known 

 to me that, in many an instance, the monog- 

 rapher who may have seemed to make little 

 of a given piece of my own or some other 

 man's work, has only done so because he could 

 not pause in the midst of his own work to 

 learn English well enough to be able to read 

 understandingly our diagnoses. Of this as- 

 pect of the case I can not forego the mention 

 of one illustration. The man across the sea, 

 being obliged to make use of a new mono- 

 graph of a certain genus, fell into something 

 nearing despair at the number of new species, 

 and expressed frankly a fear that few, if any, 

 of them could be valid. Less than a half 

 year later came word that the diagnoses were 

 found susceptible of translation into Latin; 

 that he had himself done the labor of trans- 

 lating them ; that he now understood them and 

 could not controvert the validity of the species. 



It was really, all the while, a sort of un- 

 written law in botany, that diagnoses of new 

 types should appear in Latin. To this day 

 the botanists of Norway and Sweden,' Finland 

 and Russia and Japan, and all the way back 

 again to southern and middle Europe, not 

 excepting those of England and Ireland, do 

 almost invariably, even in their monthly 

 journals, give the characters of new forms in 

 Latin. The law has been violated now and 

 then and here and there in Europe, but we on 



