34 INTRODUCTION. 
As time wore on, the authority and influence of the Linnean 
writings became lessened; and more botanists began practically 
to admit that the bestowal of a Linnean specific name had not 
sufficed to prove the various forms of plants, which Linneus him- 
self had grouped under it, to be all rightly regarded as together 
making up one single fixed species. For some time, it was more 
customary to keep up the Linnean species and its name, dis- 
tinguishing the included forms as so many “ varieties” of the 
species ; the more familiar form being usually adopted as the type, 
or else that particular form to which the brief Linnean description 
best applied, or any fragment of which chanced to have been 
preserved in his wretched herbarium, as the representative of the 
species which he had named. 
Subsequently, some of the varieties were quite separated from 
the supposed type; and other specific names having been bestowed 
upon them, they came to be admitted as real species, and were 
then held entitled to take equal rank in botanical books with the 
supposed type forms of the original compound species, or with any 
other still undivided species. But this was seldom accomplished 
without a good deal of disputation and denial; some botanists 
stoutly maintaining the separated forms to be “ only varieties,” 
while other botanists earnestly advocated their ‘claims to the 
rank of species.” 
This process has gone on to the present time, and with an 
increasing tendency among botanists to divide and subdivide the 
species named and believed in by Linneus and his earlier 
successors. Most unfortunately, while thus splitting the Linnean 
species into two or more secondary species, the original Linnean 
name was usually retained for one of them, and it was thus taken 
away from the other or others of them. As before illustrated by 
the alphabetical letters, the original name thus acquired two or 
more different meanings and applications, with a vast amount of 
confusion in botanical records, incidental on the double or multiple 
signification. The old name now means either the aggregate 
species to which it was originally given by Linneus, or only some 
one of the segregate quasi-specific forms into which that aggregate 
