THEIR NOMENCLATURE. 137 
trichophyllus and subpeltatus, and these three all independently of 
confusus, must have had a much different and mere restricted 
meaning in 1851—6. 
Further, the same name heterophyllus, in contradistinction 
against six others in 1856, or against seven others in 1867, must 
have meant and belonged to a fragment quite different from the 
half of aquatilis in 1848, or a different half in 1817, or the third 
of a half in 1851; for it becomes only the quarter of a half 
(an eighth) of the old aquatilis in 1867. How are we ever again 
to know what is truly intended by this name heterophyllus so 
diversely employed, when finding it in a list of plants or con- 
nected with a locality? The ‘Manual’ has made it unmeaning in 
England, by giving to it a different meaning in each edition. 
Truly, a Bentham to keep alive old names, used with some real 
and constant meaning, is not an useless Conservative for British 
botany, even if he do pull rather to an extreme in some cases. 
I could wish he had been conservative enough to retain in his 
‘ Handbook ’ a prefixed arrangement of genera under the Linnean 
system. But that system left out of question, I will here take 
the opportunity somewhat indirectly produced, to record my own 
conviction that Mr. Bentham’s ‘ Handbook of the British Flora’ is 
(time, 1869) the most recommendable Flora I have ever seen for a 
beginner in botany. It wanted only a little more fulness and 
clearness in noticing the severed segregates under their proper 
aggregates, to render it a thorough model guide for students of 
British botany. Those of them who might afterwards wish to 
acquire a more exact knowledge of the segregate species or 
varieties, could then very rapidly have passed on to Floras 
written under that view. For making records of localities, and for 
other such like uses, a good knowledge of the subdivisions in 
these latter works has now become indispensable; otherwise the 
records, though not wholly useless, are left much less useful than 
they might be made. 
2. Thalictrum minus, “Linn.” Auct.—This was treated as a 
single species on page 79 by reason of the impossibility of 
