312 



2. EUCALYPTUS BARK CLASSIFICATIONS. 



i. Mueller, 1859. — The first serious attempt (other than that of the unpublished 

 one of Caley) to group Eucalypts by their bark was not made until 1859, when Mueller 

 (Journ. Linn. Soc, iii, 99), as already indicated by me in Part I of the present work, 

 p. 2, divided them into six groups, viz. : — 



1. Leiophloice. — Smooth barks or Gums. 



2. Hemiphloice. — Half-barks or Boxes. 



3. Rhytiphloice. — With wrinkled persistent bark, the least satisfactory of the groups. 



4. Pachyphloice. — Stringybarks. 



5. Schizophloice. — Ironbarks. 



6. LepidopMoice. — Barks friable and lamellar. 



I did not quite understand what was meant by No. G at Part I, but at Part 

 XXII, p. 37, of the present work, I have fully explained, I think, what Mueller intended 

 to convey. 



It was probably the perusal of Mueller's paper that caused Hooker to write to 

 Bentham, under date 8th August, 1859, as follows : — 



Take Eucalyptus altogether as a genus, and it is really a remarkable vegetable, considering the 

 number of forms its bark assumes; that alone would make it notable. (L. Huxley's " Life of Hooker.') 



Bentham, 1886.— Then Bentham (B. Fl., iii, 186, 1866) writes— 



F. Mueller has proposed sections founded on the nature of the bark, of the value of which I am 

 totally unable to judge, nor have I any means of availing myself of them, for the specimens themselves 

 never show the character, and a large proportion of them are either unaccompanied by any notes of it, 

 or the collectors' notes are from various causes indefinite, unreliable, or even contradictory. 



Then in " Eucalyptographia,"' Mueller elaborated his system of 1859, as we 

 shall presently see, but he proposes to change his No. 4 (Pachyphloice) as follows : — 



In " Eucalyptographia " (under E. teirudonta) he says : — 



. . . the S3 r stematic term Pachyphfoim, adopted collectively for all the Stringybark trees, might 

 perhaps give way to the still more expressive designation Inophloice, all stringybark trees, as the name 

 implies, producing a very fibrous bark- 



I am not aware that anyone has followed Mueller in this substitution of Inophloice 

 for Pachyphloice. The stringybarks form one of the most natural of the bark-group§, 

 and there is no justification in replacing one established term by another which is a 

 synonym. 



Huxley's views on the coining of new technical terms may be quoted here, and 



the moral is capable of very wide application : — 



. terms which are open to criticism, but which I adopt in the accompanying table, 

 because they have been used. It is better for science to accept a faulty name which has the merit of 

 existence, than to burthen it with a faultless newly invented one. (" Critiques and Addresses," p. 153.) 



