100 THE ORCHID REVIEW. - LAPRIL, 1907- 
principal causes of the deplorable confusion which exists in the nomen- 
clature of garden plants—not hybrids alone be it noticed. 
I have more than once pointed out that a vernacular system of nomen- 
clature not only does not prevent confusion, but is a direct incentive to it, 
and I could give plenty of evidence in support of it, but I have not time or | 
space to-day. But I will conclude with a remark I once heard made by 
an eminent hybridist when the vernacular system began to be adopted. He 
said: “* Don’t give personal names, for hybrids are being used again as 
parents, and some of these days we shall read of a hybrid between Cattleya 
William Brown and Mary Jones, the latter being the father.” 
It was a telling argument against the use of unmodified personal names,. 
and was doubtless not intended to appear in print. But it was bound to: 
come, sooner or later, as ordinary arguments seem useless. And it has. 
kept for a good many years, and now appears with only the actual names 
altered. 
I am forgetting that our reformer has not quite done. He says “‘ Every 
day we hear complaints about the barbarous Latin names given to plants, 
but . . . we find no attempt made by the committees of the R.H.S. 
to check the practice. They are ready to shout with the multitude, but not 
to act with the few, and until they carry precepts into practice, so long will 
outsiders have reason to rail and protest.” We must get him on one 
of these Committees. 
ARGUS. 
DENDROBIUM SEEDLINGS AND MENDELS “LAW.” 
I AM sending you two series of blooms of Dendrobium seedlings, which are: 
interesting as showing how little the Mendelian “laws” of heredity, as I 
understand them, can be applied with practical value to the hybridisation 
of Orchids. 
One lot of flowers have been cut from a batch of plants raised out of the 
same seed pod, carried on a plant of D. X Wiganiz pollinated with D. X 
W. xanthochilum. D. X Wiganz is the result of crossing D. nobile and 
D. signatum together, and one might have expected from crossing this 
hybrid with another hybrid having the same origin (the two came out of | 
the same seed pod) to get plants reverting to pure D. nobile, and others t? 
pure D. signatum, but nothing of the kind has happened. There is, as YOU 
will observe, some range in the variety, but all excepting one are clearly — 
varieties of D. xX Wiganiz ; in other words, this hybrid has come true from 
seed. The one exception is certainly very distinct, and more the colout of 
