114 



induced 'M. Alphonse de Candolle to support his view that g-eneric 

 and specific citation should both date from 1753. Independently, 

 Professor Ascherson and other Berlin botanists pressed for the 

 same object, and that date is now generally accepted, and was 

 adopted in one of the ' Actes ' passed at the Vienna Congress of 

 1905. 



" But at that Congress, unfortunately, several genera were 

 made into a favoured list of ' Nomina Conservanda,' despite the 

 fact that others, avowedly of a prior date, existed. Space does 

 not allow the matter to be laboured here, but it must be said that 

 this list is either unnecessary or insufficient ; for instance, the 

 well-defined and definite genus Mariana Hill is put among the 

 names which are to be rejected, while Radicida Hill (a faulty 

 name, and a badly defined genus, excluding as it does the Water- 

 Cress, which may be looked on as the type of the genus, and 

 including the yellow-flowered species only) may be used. This 

 and other inconsistencies must in the long-run outrage the sense 

 of justice, which after all is a key-note of botanical as well as 

 human laws. Therefore the ' Nomina Conservanda ' of the 

 Vienna Congress are here deliberately ignored when other 

 generic names which appear to be properly diagnosed have 

 priority. An important section of Transatlantic botanists take 

 the same course, and in the Bidletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 

 April, 1907'"^ (which appeared after this List was prepared), state 

 that ' they regard [the exclusion of several hundred generic 

 names of plants from the operation of all nomenclatorial rules] 

 as in the highest degree arbitrary, as controverting a cardinal 

 principle.' This is not only common sense, but practical and 

 just. A plan which accepts /%j7//Vw Hill and conserves Silyhim 

 Gaertn., 1791, in preference to Mariana Hill, 1762, or which 

 retains an inchoate pseudo-homonymous genus like Epipactis of 

 Adanson or Crantz, or the faulty Gloriosa L., but rejects Cap- 

 noide s AddiV\s., which was founded by Tournefort, and the identity 

 of which is undoubted, fails to inspire confidence, and certainly 

 does not commend itself on the ground either of justice or con- 

 sistency. In many cases there must be diversity of opinion, and 

 exception may quite fairly be taken to some of the names here 

 employed, but an endeavour has been made to carry out con- 

 sistently the principles of priority." 



By ignoring the foolish and crude list, forced by the Berlin 



*The canons framed by the botanists at the meeting in Philadelphia in March, 

 1904, which are reprinted in the Bulletin, 1. c, have much to commend them for 

 their practical common sense. 



