1879. } ` Botany. 185 | 
t 
express my opinion on the use of personal names in scientific 
nomenclature. __ 
Linneus in his Philosophia Botanica proposes: “ Nomina 
generica ad botanici optime meriti memoriam conservandam con- 
structa sanite servanda sunt. Hoc unicum et summum premium 
laboris sanite servandum et caste dispensandum.” I agree with 
this proposition. Generical names established for the memory of 
the most deserving botanists should be kept sacred and imparted 
abstemiously. 
ike the preacher, who warned his congregation to act accord- 
ing to his saying not according to his doing, Linnæus did not 
always strictly follow his own maxim, but the rule he proposes is 
a good one. Though I would prefer even for genera characteristic 
names, I would not blame an author who likes to honor the zost 
deserving? botanists by baptizing genera after their names. 
In regard to specific names, Linnæus advises against the use of 
names of persons or countries. He says: “Inventoris vel alius 
cujusquinque nomen in differentia non adhibeatur. Locus 
natalis species distinctas non tradit. Differentia specifica continet 
differentize zotas essentiales” Indeed a species that has not one 
character by which it can be distingushed from its congeners is 
not worth being called a species. In contradiction to this rule 
the Commission of European botanists, appointed by the Inter- 
national Congress at Paris, 1867, allowed the use of personal 
names. Itis true what De Candolle says in the preface to those 
rules, that the Linnæan rules of nomenclature are obsolete, but 
just in this case I think Linnæus was right, and if that commis- 
sion had considered how much personal names were misused and 
are misused in our time more than ever, then articles 32, 33 and 
36 would not have passed in their present form. Of said misuse 
I could name many cases, but I take only one: Scheele pub- 
lished in Zinnæa 114 new Texan plants, among which I count 
twenty-one Remeriana, fourteen Lindheimeriana, one Griseġachii 
and twenty Terana. When we deduct from the rest those which 
had already been described, more than half of all the new species 
got names which mean nothing more than a cheap compliment, 
worthtess to a true scientist. The owners of the three above-men- 
tioned personal names are botanists indeed (whether most deserving 
I am not competent to decide), but how often has a species to 
bear the name of a man who finds a new species as a blind hen 
1 Many are called, but few chosen. 
