Led 
1895.] Botany. 667 
botanical nomenclature is a cosmopolitan character,” is not to be ques- 
tioned, and the Rochester movement was intended to be a step toward 
such a result. So also the first rule proposed by the protestants, viz. : 
that “ ordinal names having long-established usage should not be sub- 
jected to revision upon theoretical grounds,” is one with which few- 
will disagree, and this again was not referred to in the Rochester 
Rules. The rule requiring the retention of “ long-established and 
generally known generic names ” is a curious one. Starting out with 
the positive statement that they should be retained, we are next told 
that ‘‘ the scope of this rule is left to the discretion of writers” !! How 
about those whose discretion results in a more rigid scrutiny of such 
doubtful names? Under the rule, who shall judge between us when 
we disagree? Moreover, it is urged upon writers that generic nomen- 
clature should not depart far from Benthams and Hooker’s Genera 
Plantarum, Baillon’s Histoire des Plantes, and Engler and Prantl’s 
Natiirlichen Pflanzenfamilien—“ for the present”! No plank relating 
to a doubtful question in politics could be more ambiguously drawn so 
as to provide that flexibility necessary to meet individual preferences. 
After permitting individual discretion, and allowing some departure 
(less than the vague distance, “a”) from three somewhat different 
standards, and this only for the present, how much efficiency is left in 
the rule? ee 
The third rule is scarcely less curious than the second. It is that 
“in specific nomenclature the first correct combination is to be pre- 
ferred.” Of course. Nobody is asked by the Rochester Rules to pre- 
fer any other than the first correct combination. The form of the 
rule is absurd. The protestants certainly do not wish us to infer that 
there may be a second “correct combination”—or possibly more. 
That would be a peculiar priority rule, indeed! But this is not what 
the protestants wished to say. They probably meant to say that “the 
correct specific name of a plant is that which it first bears after it has 
been referred to the proper genus,” at least this is what the context 
suggests. The argument for this rule of priority under the genus, as 
against the third of the Rochester Rules, can not be said to be well 
sustained. Many of the earlier references of species to genera from 
which they had subsequently to be removed, can not, in justice, be re- 
garded as cases of “ description under an incorrect genus.” ` Are we 
simply to ignore the fact as of little importance that Linné described a 
plant now known as Steironema ciliatum ninety years earlier than the 
date of its transfer from Lysimachia to Steironema? It is very diff- 
cult to see wherein the binomial has any advantage over the specific 
