feecent Progress and present State of Systematic Botany. 347 
present needs, retaining all its advantages. The other course 
we fear will tend to prolixity and looseness, however well it 
may work in such judicious and practised hands as those of 
Mr. Bentham. Finally, if we have no diagnosis, but only a 
If we retain the Latin diagnosis, we may well retain the abla- 
tive case,as having some advantage in succinctness, and the 
prestige of long use. A reasonable punctuation ought, however, 
to be settled on,—the two prevalent extremes being about 
equally awkward and inconvenient. uste milieu is not far to 
seek. Even in English there is still advantage in the diagnos- 
tic form, relegating details and subsidiary or explanatory mat- 
ter toa separate sentence or paragra 
Linnzeus’s two great gifts, the binomial nomenclature 
and the diagnosis, we are almost as reluctant to give up the 
one as the other 
Upon the languages actually in use in systematic botany, Mr. 
Bentham has some interesting remarks, which fill three or four 
pages. In the preparation of this and his previous somewhat 
similar addresses, he had to consult cigs publications in 
no less than fifteen languages. Surely no other living bot- 
anist is able to do so, and to read a aw of them with 
facility. It is conceded that, while works intended for the 
beginner or amateur, or for teaching the well-known botany of 
a particular country, should be in t the familiar language of the 
moreover, is “best suited for technical diagnoses and descrip- 
tions, from its concise character and from its sasceptibility 8 
being subjected to technical forms, without jarring es i 
conventionalities of living ames in - amiliar To 
guity, except by transferring the terms themselves, as we have 
done, into English, the genius of our language lending itself 
readily to the transference. rs a y, botanical English and 
botanical Latin are 3 much alike. 
odern languages are, and must needs be, more and more 
used for general descriptions sie scientific investigations and 
discussions; “and of these are three which at the present day 
every botanist ought to understand, and in one of which [be- 
sides “9 vernacular] he o — to be able to write,—all three 
Am. Jour. Sc1.—THIRD _ ou. IX, No. 53.—Mar, 1875. 
