188 



Enquiries directed to a few Ontario herbaria have failed to add 

 to this list. Also, from enquiries made, it does not appear that any 

 of these colonies have attracted further notice. In each case the 

 possibility of spread had been pointed out, perhaps to good purpose. 



Linnaeus' Rules of Nomenclature 



A Chapter in the History of Plant Names 



H. W. RiCKETT 



In a modern textbook of botany we read the naive assertion that 

 "botanists began the use of Latin names in order to avoid con- 

 fusion." Actually the use of Latin by scholars was a survival, not 

 a beginning; a survival from times when Latin was the spoken 

 language of the civilized world. It has not always avoided con- 

 fusion. Botanists of the eighteenth century thought it strange to use 

 names other than Latin, and Linnaeus habitually wrote in Latin 

 to his scientific correspondents. This helps explain why we have had 

 to wait 200 years for a translation into English of an important 

 work by the father of botany. 



The Critica Botanica of Linnaeus now appears in a translation 

 by the late Sir Arthur Hort, revised by Miss M. L. Green, and 

 published by the Ray Society. In 1736 Linnaeus produced his 

 Fundamenta Botanica, a small volume in which he expounded the 

 science of botany as he understood it ; one of the earliest of text- 

 books. Chapters VII-IX contained, in 115 brief numbered para- 

 graphs, his proposals for a system of nomenclature of plants, which 

 should reduce the prevailing chaos to rational and orderly proce- 

 dure. The following year, largely because of the opposition of other 

 botanists to some of his suggestions, he published the 115 aphorisms 

 with full discussions and exemplification ; this was the Critica. 

 The Fundamenta formed the basis of the Philosophia Botanica of 

 1751, in which the discussion of nomenclature was again condensed. 



Though he later abandoned many of his own ideas, these earlier 

 works by Linnaeus are of value in tracing the development of his 

 thought and in illuminating the problems which he encountered. He 

 here propounds the rules, so long taken for granted that it is now 

 difficult to imagine the conditions that made them necessary, that 



