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congres (1753) sont en general corrects et n'ont pas ete exageres 

 pour les besoins de la cause " ; and p. 55 : " Nous nous mettrons 

 franchement du cote" de Mr. Kuntze et de 1'ancienne proposition 

 d'Alph. de Candolle pour reclamer l'annee 1737 comme point de 

 depart de la nomenclature generique." 



Many American and other botanists were willing to use the 

 Kew Index, as they thought it to contain the year 1753 as starting- 

 point, which, however, turns out to be not ; for the Kew Index has 

 no fixed starting-point at all, which might have been used for any 



On p. 28 Mr. Jackson writes as to me : " Although he never 

 saw Darwin, yet he professes to know his wishes better than Sir 

 Joseph Hooker." I know the wishes of Mr. Darwin by Mr. Jackson 

 himself; see Journ. of Bot. 1887 p. 67, where he wrote "that it 

 was the wish of Mr. Darwin to produce a modernised Steudel's 

 Nomenclator.'' The most condemnable and really unscientific 

 deviation from Steudel's Nomenclator is, that Hooker and Jackson 

 omitted the specific synonyms at their proper place: under the 

 valid name of each species. 



For an exhaustive censure of Mr. Jackson's review would here 

 not be the place. 



By the courtesy of the Editor I have been enabled to see the 

 foregoing before publication. Although naturally reluctant to 

 engage in anything which savours of personality, the statements of 

 Dr. Kuntze are such that it might be supposed that I approved 

 them if I remained silent. 



Dr. Kuntze had the freest access to the MS. Index, as he 

 acknowledged in his former work : he used it constantly, and the 

 date when he had obtained all the information he wanted from 

 it matters nothing ; his work would have assumed a very different 

 complexion but for our accumulated material. He has the bad 

 taste to allude to the case of Tropmolum ; that copy was furnished 

 at his request from our unrevised entries, on the express stipulation 

 that I should be in return furnished with additions and corrections, 

 but Dr. Kuntze has failed to fulfil his part of the contract. I knew 

 perfectly his relative use of the London libraries, but his note on 

 page cxci needed explanation. 



With regard to the Obolaria question, Dr. Kuntze allows his 

 animosity to get the better of his reason. Having a strong dislike 

 to Linnaeus, as shown in his Revisio, he now seeks to convict him 

 of deliberately suppressing Siegesbeck's genera, and founding his 

 own on them. It is a fact that all system-mongers of the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries thought nothing of renaming genera 

 and species, just as at the present day almost every German pro- 

 fessor has his own scheme of plant -arrangement. I have already 

 commented on the stupidity of judging Linnseus by the standard of 

 to-day, but some minds are invincibly prejudiced, and to these it 

 may seem right to foist into one man's system the ideas of hi3 

 opponent. I venture to think that LinnsBus scarcely needs even 

 this defence, as will be seen from the followiug. 



