2l8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



and he gives to them a kind of precedence, making them the head- 

 ings of his chapters, there might arise a question whether the Greek 

 names were preferred on account of their right of priority. But 

 there is other evidence that the principle of priority in nomencla- 

 ture obtained no recognition with him; was perhaps never once 

 thought of. The standard works on the materia medica in use 

 ever5rwhere in Fuchsius' day had been written in Greek; which 

 fact alone would give the highest prestige to Greek plant names. 

 Their Latin names, needful to be used for the convenience of the 

 many who knew Latin but not Greek, were in every way as valid 

 as the Greek names. Both were used, chiefly as a matter of the 

 greater convenience to readers and students as a body. That he 

 never thought about rights of priority as worth contending for 

 comes out as clearly as possible in his presenting a new genus with 

 the new generic name Digitalis. "We make use of this name, 

 until we ourselves or some one else shall have invented a better 

 one."^ 



The above remark attests its author's opinion that there could 

 be appropriate names and inappropriate, and that names either 

 bad, or even not very good, might well be suppressed in favor of 

 new ones more suitable. Even the principle of convenience, which 

 always favors the retention of an established name whether bad 

 or good, may be overruled for the rejection of a name that is ill 

 constructed, and the substitution of a new and better one. There 

 is one generic name that had held good for some fifteen centuries, 

 a Greek name too, which he declines to adopt as the heading of 

 its chapter, evidently because etymologically distasteful to him. 

 The name in Greek is Ocimoides, formed by the addition of oides to 

 the generic name Ocimum. Instead of the ancient and established 

 Ocimoides he writes for a heading to the chapter the new name 

 OcimastrumP' ; an initiative in the reform of generic nomenclature 

 which Linnasus two centuries later was to carry forward with 

 universal approval. 



He who thinks that nomenclature, like the science itself, should 

 be subject to advancement and improvement, must be believed 

 to have his reasons; though Fuchsius does not appear to have 

 declared his. One thing, however, we observe, and that is that all 

 the names he uses have their meanings. A genus is named in 

 allusion to some morphologic or qualitative characteristic; or else 

 in honor of some personage who had to do with botany; or rarely, 



> Hist. Stirp., p. 892. 

 'Ibid., p. 8gs. 



