437 



Bateson says : " Between Jordan with his 200-odd species for EropMla and 

 Grenier arid Gordon with one, there is no hesitation possible, Jordan's view ... is 

 at least a review of natural facts, whereas the collective species is a mere abstraction." 



Jost uses the phrase " species-mongering " perhaps with a little pardonable 

 impatience, bearing in nrind the human tendency to form two camps, the " splitters " 

 and the " lumpers," both groups of honest empirics. The fact remains that the 

 extent to which the working botanist will divide plants will remain a matter of expedi- 

 ency — if the subdivision be too minute, nomenclature defeats the very object for which 

 it was established, and in place of no names at all, we substitute an unworkable 

 aggregation of them. 



6. A Classical Case of " Splitting." 



Jordan's is scientific splitting, but Swainson 's case of empirical splitting is 

 wicked. It is in an unlikely place to look for it, viz., " Further Papers relative to the 

 Discovery of Gold in Australia." Presented to (British) Parliament, December, 1854. 

 Botanical report by William Swainson, F.R.S., pp. 98 el sea. 



I have abstracted it in my Presidential Address before the Linnean Society of New 

 South Wales (Proc. XXVI 797, 1901). Swainson had the temerity to give an exhibition 

 of reckless species-making that, so far as I know, stands unparalleled in the annals of 

 botanical literature. As a " shocking example " as to what lengths an unbridled 

 systematist may go, it certainly should not be buried in the pages of a geological 

 Blue-book. Of Eucalyptus alone, from limited areas in Victoria, and one in New South 

 Wales, he makes no less than 1,520 species and varieties. After that performance, 

 his list of 201 species of Casuarina from a limited area is a mere trifle. 



7. Application of Zoological Tests to a Botanical Species. 



Speaking of a zoological classification of galls, i.e., according to the animal causing 

 the gall, Kerner and Oliver (" The Natural History of Plants," ii, 528) say — 



" A systematic classification of this sort, on the lines of the classification of animals, might be of use to 

 zoologists, but to the botanist its value is only secondary. He must, as in other similar cases, keep to 

 morphology as the primary ground of classification, and has to arrange the structures according to their 

 agreement in development. ' 



For a long time I hoped that the insects forming Brachyscelid galls would exercise 

 such a discrimination towards species of Eucalyptus that a basis of Eucalyptus classi- 

 fication would be available, but it broke down as knowledge progressed. See Part 

 LXVI, p. 282, of my " Forest Flora of New South Wales." 



Following a somewhat similar train of thought, zoologists may make interesting 

 observations that the White Ant or the Native Bear take up certain attitudes to plants 

 representing certain botonicr.l species, but, inasmuch as these animals cannot, as a 

 rule, be practically applied to specimens of Eucalyptus to secure diagnoses based on 

 their food plants, we cannot employ them as a means to that end. 



