THEIR NOMENCLATURE. 441 
The minus of the ‘ Manual’ (or the eu-minus of ‘ English Botany ’) 
is divisible further into var: maritimwm and var: montanum. 
Including these two varietal subdivisions, the segregates now 
stand at five, and have remained so since 1862, but indications of 
other variations have already been given. I confess myself unable 
to apportion half the specimens in my own herbarium satis- 
factorily among the five; and hardly care to do so, in truth, under 
an expectation of other changes impending. 
And now, puzzled Reader, can you instruct me how the 
localities recorded for minus or majus nominally, in the times of 
Ray, or Hudson, or Smith, or Babington up to 1856 inclusive, 
are to be apportioned among the four species of 1862—70; among 
the eu-minus, flecuosum, Hochii, saxatile no. 2, and the two 
varietal halves of eu-minus ? Lists and localities, in or for which 
the old names of minus and majus have been used, have now 
become unavailable in attempting to trace out the distribution of 
any of the four or five segregates adopted for the present; but 
how soon to be rejected in favour of some other mode of dividing 
and naming the aggregate minus, who can say? Even should 
the writer of a Local Flora, or the recorder of a locality, expressly 
follow the ‘Manual of British Botany’ (and, it is fully admitted, 
he could hardly do better at present), it would still be necessary 
for him to inform his own readers, which one of the six editions 
he supposed himself to be following, in his nomenclature and 
species of Thalictrum. The next score years will prove insufficient 
time, in this instance, to rectify the mischief arisen, and still 
to arise, through an unwise introduction of new names and 
descriptions into books, before the plant-species themselves had 
been properly investigated and understood. 
8. Viola canina, Auct.—The canine violets have been divided 
and treated under several names on page 108, because the 
separate distribution of some of these modern segregates could be 
shewn with fair approximation to accuracy, although still not 
fully shewn even in Britain by itself. Originally, they were 
treated as a single species by Ray and his predecessors ; perhaps 
38L 
