336 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
furnish occupation for a large number of thinkers and writers, and 
when the transient forms evolved under the hand of man and adver- 
tised and marketed in accordance with prevalent business methods 
have to be taken cognizance of, it becomes almost a pigs-in-clover 
proposition. For some years past the leaders in horticultural thought 
have been agreed on the adoption of simple and short vernacular 
names for such forms, and official action tending to secure a consist- 
ent application of principles of good taste, good sense, and business 
wisdom has been taken at various times by the American Pomologi- 
cal Society, the representatives of the principal experiment stations, 
and the Society of American Florists, while in 1893 a botanical 
congress at Madison, on the report of a committee of international 
membership, endorsed the actions of these bodies with the recom- 
mendation that, for practical reasons, the great Index Kewensis be 
- taken as the basis of nomenclature for the more permanent forms 
bearing Latinized names. These various conclusions have been 
made the working basis of the Cyclopedia, and although the parti- 
tioning of the work among many persons has made the results 
attained less uniform than would have been the case if one person 
had done it all, the book is going to place in the reach of makers of 
American trade catalogues a model which they can follow, and which 
it will be to their ultimate business interest to follow; while such 
action on their part will do very much to raise the semi-science of 
the botany of cultivated plants to a position where the general monog- 
raphers of plants can take cognizance of and utilize its great array 
of facts — a result which in one way or another the first half of the 
twentieth century must see achieved. T. 
