BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE IX NORTH AMERICA. 827 



American botanists have been and are governed by established 

 laws in nomenclature, a new school has arisen whose aim is to 

 introduce a new system, one which is thought objectionable as 

 bringing in " fresh elements of confusion." 



Not to pause for a moment in explanation or defence of a 

 system which, so far from being new, our esteemed critic himself 

 knows to have been long recognised and adhered to as the correct 

 one, hi almost every one of the great branches of systematic 

 biology outside of the one department of phanerogamic botany ; in 

 which latter branch, even, it has had respectable advocates ; I am 

 only called upon to show that no contrast quite so striking really 

 exists between the practices of ourselves of the " new school," if so 

 we are to be called, and those of our elders. 



We are censured in this ; that we suffer ourselves to be governed 

 by the principle of priority in relation to specific, as well as generic, 

 names. Since we had to be subjected to an ordeal so rather trying 

 as that of a comparison of our own wisdom and discretion with 

 those of our fathers, — for by such comparison the younger in- 

 evitably, and perhaps always more or less justly, suffers, — it might 

 have been well to mention the one thing wherein we should seem 

 commendable above those who have gone before us, i. e., our 

 resolute defence of, and abiding by, the law of priority in generic 

 names. The earlier race of American botanists herein exhibit a 

 laxity of view, with which our own strictness forms a contrast; 

 and it is not from any representatives of an old school in America 

 that such genera as Hooker a and Casta I i a, which the Editor of this 

 Journal has so clearly shown to be of obligation under the law of 

 priority, will meet with approval and adoption. The remnant of 

 that party here resists these reinstatements with whatever it has 

 retained of its former influence and authority. 



Against the practice of restoring old specific names in those 

 genera when new ones had been made to replace them, it must be 

 admitted that Dr. Gray sometimes argued, " with his wonted care 

 and ability," in divers journalistic paragraphs; and our friends in 

 England, not having looked into his books to see how very often, 

 through successive pages of plant-naming and describing, he adopts 

 the very practice which he disapproves in others, imagine that 

 bere they have made a point against us. We would, therefore, 

 invite attention to Dr. Gray's nomenclature of any of the genera of 

 the Synoptical Flora, in which there are Linnaan species now 

 placed in other genera. Take the Erkacea for an example. There 

 is Rhododendron, at present made to include the species of the 

 Linnaan Azalea. There are named and described five species of 

 the Azalea subdivision. Every one of them had received its first 

 specific name under Azalea. To four out of the five, new specific 

 names had been given upon their introduction into Rhododendron ; 

 but, in each of these four instances, our author has rejected the 

 " first name which the species received under its proper genus, 

 adopting that more recent combination which embraces the old 

 specific name under Azalea. One of my colleagues in America has 



