THE F£RN BULLETIN 



79 



botanical activity may know that on this point, as on 

 many others, the editor's code represents himself alone. 

 Whatever may be said in regard to controverted 

 nomenclatorial points, upon which codes differ, it 

 would hardly be deemed advisable to take exceptions 

 to those points on which there is unanimity. If every- 

 one with a pet theory insists on embodying it in practi- 

 cal usage we shall have a condition of anarchy in which 

 no one can understand current botanical literature 

 without a voluminous card catalog for reference. 



The Ames Botanical Laboratory. 



[The foregoing is an excellent example of the reas- 

 oning that some people adopt to convince us that a 

 species once named is not named. One can make rules 

 for anything, but this does not prove that they are 

 right. Mr. Eaton and his friends seem to have a code 

 which assumes that the editor belongs to a different 

 species because he does not subscribe to all the ab- 

 surdities their rules require, but we are inclined to 

 think that the differences are only varietal. As to the 

 editor being the only person who objects to changing 

 the names of plants to accommodate those who would 

 write their own names after them, this seems to be a 

 misunderstanding upon the part of our critic. You 

 can stand a man so near a cathedral that he can only 

 see the bricks and stones right in front of him and 

 misses entirely the beauty of the whole. So, too, one 

 can contemplate his own brand of nomenclature so 

 closely that he cannot see the relationships of the whole 

 subject in proper perspective. This seems to be the 

 trouble with our correspondent. The facts in the 

 Isoetes case from our angle are these : Engelmann 

 found a plant and gave it a name. Eaton later found 

 the same form, did not recognize it and gave it 



