August 23, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



281 



frequently by other writers who may have 

 had occasion to review his work. These 

 alterations extend all the way from simple 

 substitutions of one letter for another to the 

 replacement of the name itself, generic or 

 specific or both, by an appellation con- 

 sidered more appropriate. When to this 

 uncertain element in plant nomenclature 

 we add the whole vexed question of the 

 principle of priority and the subject of type 

 determination, it seems remarkable that in 

 the progress of botanical science so few op- 

 posing schools of belief have been developed. 



It may be profitable to give some con- 

 sideration to the various views that have 

 been entertained regarding the extent of al- 

 teration permissible in the case of incorrect 

 or inappropriate scientific names. For con- 

 venience in discussion the various categories 

 under which changes have been made will 

 be taken up under separate headings. 



1. False Descriptive Names. — Botanical 

 nomenclature includes countless numbers 

 of these, many of which have found accept- 

 ance from time immemorial. Thus Poly gala 

 is wholly destitute of milky juice ; the stem- 

 leaves of Campanula rotuncUfolia, which are 

 frequently the only leaves discernible at 

 maturity, are narrowly linear ; Viola villosa 

 is in no sense villous ; and Lunaria annua 

 is usually biennial. While the modern no- 

 menclator would find little support in an at- 

 tempt to change such names on the ground 

 of their unsuitability, the practice was com- 

 mon among writers of the first half of the 

 nineteenth century, as well as among the 

 immediate successors of Linnaeus. Rafin- 

 esque, in particular, was fond of reading the 

 riot act to his contemporaries for what he 

 considered an outrageous disregard of nat- 

 ural characters in the assignment of plant 

 names, as the following verbatim passage, 

 selected at random from the ' New Flora 

 of North America ' (Vol. 2, page 95) will 

 show : 



'' My genus Diplostelma, which Nuttall 



had wrongly reduced to Actinocarpus, in 

 Collins' herb, (there is no such genus, he 

 meant probably Actinospermum of Elliott) 

 has been described by him under the name 

 Chetanthera in his new plants. * * * My 

 name is the best, although Nuttall's dates 

 of 1834, Chetanthera means bristly anthers, 

 while this is not the case, he ought to have 

 named it Chetopappus, but as the pappus is 

 double and different mine is the best, and 

 must be retained." 



In the case of Lunaria annua mentioned 

 above, published by Linnaeus in 1753, we 

 find that Moench subsequently altered the 

 name to biennis in recognition of its bien- 

 nial character. Writers like Bentham and 

 Gray did not adopt this extreme view, but 

 if in the transfer of a species from one 

 genus to another the specific designation 

 became inappropriate through duplication 

 of the idea contained in the generic name, 

 they invariably took the liberty of changing 

 it. Thus when Anemonella thalictroides was 

 transferred to Thalictrum, it became Thalic- 

 trum anemonoides. Inasmuch as the accept- 

 ance of such a combination as ' Thalictrum 

 thalictroides ' would imply an agreement 

 with the doctrine of the entity of specific 

 names it was entirely natural and logical 

 for Bentham and his associates, who were 

 strong opponents of that doctrine, to con- 

 sider such cases exceptional to the rule of 

 priority. If, however, we admit that a 

 specific name is meaningless when disasso- 

 ciated with a generic, there seems no good 

 reason why we should not continue the 

 process of alteration, and follow in the 

 footsteps of the immediate post-Linnaeans. 

 There can be no half-way ground between 

 him who would substitute ' biennis ' for 

 ' an7iiia ' on the one hand, and the botanist 

 who believes in the immutability of spe- 

 cific names on the other. 



2. False Locality Names. — The writings of 

 Linnaeus and his contemporaries abound 

 in instances of this sort. In many cases 



