— 6i — 



with regard to other species. He gave it a name. Now 

 comes the Congress and rules that if the one who named 

 the specimen did not guess correctly the position the 

 next generation of name-tinkers would give it, his name 

 is to be turned down and anybody else may guess at it. 

 This is nonsense and not worthy of those gentlemen who 

 laud " priority." In this connection, referring to the 

 remark that an independent code in each country is pro- 

 vincialism, we take pleasure in pointing out that the 

 so-called " American code " is just this very thing, and 

 yet a lot of our prominent botanists appear to be follow- 

 ing it. If they can repudiate other wiser rules, why not 

 also include in the repudiation this absurd one that a 

 plant is not named unless the namer is fortunate enough 

 to guess the specific value that others will put upon it. 



For nearly fifteen years this magazine has steadily 

 objected to tinkering with the names of ferns. Our per- 

 sistence has behind it no desire to belittle the energy of 

 the gentlemen engaged in mixing up plant names, but 

 to insist that this energy would be of greater usefulness 

 if directed into other channels. What we need is more 

 information about ferns and less information about what 

 some dead-and-gone author called them. It has become 

 all too common for individuals with a meagre knowledge 

 of ferns in the field to locate in a library and imagine 

 they are contributing to the sum of our knowledge by 

 rearranging plants and plant-names in systems that will 

 give their own names much prominence. 



Just as this issue is being made up word comes of the 

 death of Mr. B. D. Gilbert, which occurred at his home 

 in Clayville, N. Y., on June 3rd. Mr. Gilbert was for 

 many years a prominent business man in the city of 

 Utica, N. Y., was an authority on dairying and wrote 



