AN UlirWBITTl]Sr LAW. 201 



An Unwritten Law of Nomenclature. 



In the process of genus-naming, whether in relation to ani- 

 mals or plants, there are possible courses of action not a few 

 that are in various degrees open to objection as leading to the 

 introduction of names more or less offensive and repugnant to 

 good taste. Many names of that character had become estab- 

 lished in earlier and later pre-Linnaean botany ; so many that, 

 with the steady advance in literary learning and mental refine- 

 ment, early in the eighteenth century Linnaeus seems to have 

 felt that the time was ripe for a reform of nomenclature in this 

 particular. There existed then, as there has always existed, 

 and most naturally, a deep sense of the right of priority in 

 nomenclature; but such appears to have been the degree of 

 dissatisfaction felt with a host of generic names then in vogue, 

 that Linnaeus' rules published as code in the Philosophia 

 Botanica led at once to the suppression of a long list of dis- 

 tasteful names despite their being under the supposed protection 

 of the law of priority. Such expurgation of generic nomencla- 

 ture as was then made could never have been effected through 

 the mere will of one individual reformer. Botanists in general, 

 as men of culture, must have been already more or less disgusted 

 with the superabundance of cheaply and easily made names 

 that were current in all the books, and upon the tongues of all 

 teachers of our science. Let any one who will, look for himself 

 into the indexes of genera found in the excellent volumes of 

 Kay, Tournefort, Vaillant, Boerhaave and others of the most 

 celebrated among the immediate precursors of the Swedish 

 reformer. There are I think hardly fewer than a hundred 

 names formed by the mere adding of aides at the end of the 

 generic name to make a new one for some different genus. 

 Carex, for example, was Cyperoides, Oxytropis was Astragaloides, 

 one rosaceous Pentaphyllum, and next after it Pentaphylloides, 

 this indistinctive undignified onomatology — ready-made, so to 

 speak ; for the most illiterate pretender to anything approach- 

 ing botany could by this cheap trick make a hundred or two of 



Leaflets op Botanical Observation and Ceitioism, Vol. I pp 

 201-212, April 10, 1906. 



