AN UNWRITTEN LAW 303 



lowed to bear, in its structure, any allusion to the man to whom 

 the genus had been at first dedicated. An unwritten law against 

 such a procedure was recognized ; a law, one may say, of com- 

 mon sense, common courtesy, good taste. 



The earliest instance of an apparently deliberate transgression 

 of this unwritten law that I meet with so far, I find in Kunth's 

 Bnumeratio, Volume V, published in 1850. There may be 

 earlier cases, though I think not. At that date there had been 

 already two genera dedicated to De Witt Clinton under the name 

 CUntonia, one in 1817, the other in 1829. I need not here repeat 

 the bibliography, for I gave it in the second volume of Pittonia 

 more than sixteen years since. The author of the name, as it 

 appeared in 1829, had no knowledge of the existence of the same 

 aa applied to another genus in 1817. His — the second CUntonia — 

 was therefore but an accident; but in 1850, Kunth finding the 

 1817 CUntonia valid, altered that of 1829 to Wittia, thus dedi- 

 cating a second genus to De Witt Clinton. A few years later 

 Dr. Torrey came to know this and promptly declined to make 

 use of or give recognition to Kunth's Wittia; but, though it 

 had priority in its favor, he suppressed it, substituting Dow- 

 ningia ; and Downingia was at once adopted everywhere, both in 

 America and in Europe, Wittia therefore hardly obtaining recog- 

 nition as a synonym. This must have been Dr. Torrey's first inti- 

 mation that it could ever enter into the mind of a botanist to 

 do such violence to one of the most fundamental principles of 

 nomenclature; and his only passing comment on Kunth's error is 

 "It would be inadmissible to bestow two genera on the same 

 person.'" It is possible, barely, that Kunth did not know that 

 Eafinesque's original CUntonia had been dedicated to the same 

 Clinton ; but that is unimportant. No one has ever admitted 

 Wittia as a name, because, as Torrey said, that and the Clintonias 

 are named for the same man. 



I do not know that any case like the above was again fur- 

 nished until some forty years later ; but from about the time of 

 the appearing of Mr. Otto Kuntze's Kevisio this phase of degener- 

 acy in nomenclature made a new beginning and has not yet met 



'Pacific Railway Report, iv. 116 (1857). 



