THEIR NOMENCLATURE. 429 
recorders of localities will be continually making mistakes, through 
their use of specific names which only confuse, instead of 
explaining, what the records were intended to make known. 
1, Ranunculus aquatilis, Linn. —The various and very un- 
equal divisions of this great aggregate species into a larger or 
smaller number of subordinate species, with their recombination 
into a single aggregate, in Bentham’s ‘ Handbook of the British 
Flora,’ have previously come under notice as illustrations of the 
” They are well adapted further for illustrating 
the more immediate bearing of such changes upon those records 
of localities, at different dates, which must frequently be taken as 
present evidences in tracing out distribution, and also for shewing 
how inconveniently they nullify the usefulness of the records. 
Independently of the hederaceus and Lenormandi, and leaving 
“grades of species. 
the intermediate tripartitus non-assigned to anything else, the 
Linnean aquatilis was treated as four several species on pages 
81—2. The first of the four, the aquatilis of many authors, may 
be taken as synonymous with the type form which very usually 
has been named also heterophyllus in books. The second, given 
under the two modern names of trichophyllus and Drouetii very 
confusedly applied among English botanists, may be said to 
correspond with the old segregate recorded under the names of 
tenuifolius or capillaceus, or more lately as pantothrix; but 
excluding those terrestrial states of heterophyllus, which out of 
water are of course destitute of “floating” leaves, and which 
usually have only the multipartite leaves on them. Fries would 
absurdly restrict the old name of heterophyllus, used in so many 
books to mean aquatilis (after deducting tenuwifolius, circinatus, 
and fluitans), to some very special form closely allied to Drouetii 
and trichophyllus ; in other words, he tries to give the name an 
application and meaning quite different from what it has in all 
works of older date than his own. And he has found English 
imitators in this mischievous folly. 
The remaining two out of the four, the circinatus and jluitans, 
also have been frequently confused with pantothrix, and indeed 
