58 MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
in its every written page, and paragraph, and period, conform to the 
truth. Not one falsehood, which he has found to be such, can be 
admitted to his page. No ecumenical conclave of the world’s 
botanical authorities, by their vote favoring falsities, can receive 
from the botanical truth-lover a moment’s consideration. Thoug 
almost all the botanical books of the last hundred years assert that 
Linnaeus founded the genus ADIANTUM, and almost all botanical 
authorities of to-day will anathematize the daring man who 
eliminates from his booklet that and all falsehoods like it, the truth- 
lover—who alone is the truly scientific man—writes down the truth, 
spurning the untruth however often reiterated and almost super- 
stitiously venerated. ADIANTUM, the fern genus, dates not from 
- Linnaeus and 1753, but from Theophrastus Eresius, who ended a 
glorious botanical career just about twenty centuries before Linnaeus 
was born. It ought to seem—perhaps a few centuries hence, if not 
even a few score years from now it may seem—to have been a 
strange condition of things, that in the beginning of the twentieth 
century the falsifying of the history of plant-genera, and of plant 
names, should have been so almost universally practiced and 
approved, as virtually to bring maledictions on the head of any 
botanist who, knowing and respecting the truth about such matters, 
should dare however quietly and unostentatiously to promulgate it. 
To have devoted so many paragraphs to this typical example 
of generic nomenclature in the booklet before us requires no apology. 
The whole subject is, and for years has been, too prominently before 
the botanical systematists of every land. And I am the more cogently 
. impelled to a clear setting forth of the opinions of this writer by the 
fact that ostensibly, in the meditation of these supposedly intricate 
questions he has come out into the open daylight—has reached an 
advanced point attained by few—where no need is realized of so- 
called codes, the labored product of associations and congresses who 
seem to but scratch over the mere surface of the whole question, 
and deal with matters of present expediency to the utter ignoring 
of eternal principles. Mr. Tidestrom’s position on generic nomen- 
clature Se recalls that one expressed by the late Professor 
.H. Bail of Paris, when he said that the only principle of no- 
eue worth any consideration is that of historic priority ; 
principle which every conclave of botanical nomenclators that an 
met in recent years has voted to ignore. 
Books of descriptive botany, even the conventional and the 
mediocre, are apt to give parenthetically after each Latin- or Greek- 
made generic name, some explanation real or supposed of the names 
oh 
a 
a 
X 
