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REPORT OX THE 



Professor Foster had summed up the situation exactly to his 

 mind. With regard to the naming of garden forms, he would 

 suggest that a drawing should be made of every plant to which a 

 foreign name was applied, and that its description should be 

 published either in the Gardeners' Chronicle or in the Journal of 

 the Horticultural Society : and any plant which did not show a 

 difference sufficient to be ascertained by this description should 

 not be recognized at all. One great want in connection with the 

 Society, he thought, was what he might term a Koyal Horti- 

 cultural Society Garden Nomenclaturist. He thought there 

 should be a botanist connected with the Society who would 

 devote himself to the naming of plants, from a garden point of 

 view, because a purely botanical point of view was not all 

 sufficient for cultivators' purposes. They wanted, first of all, 

 some authority to draw out a limitation of the species. He 

 thought it might have a very great effect if the Conference would 

 petition Professor Keichenbach to frame a summary of the work 

 he had done in his lifetime. They would lose a great deal if he 

 did not do it. With regard to the popular names for imported 

 forms of Orchids he would put them on precisely the same 

 grounds as those raised in the country, because they occupied 

 the same position. They had come from seeds, and he thought 

 they also might receive popular names ; for instance, Painted 

 Lady, or something of that kind. He quite agreed with 

 Professor Foster's view of the necessity of the Horticultural 

 Society keeping a register of all these plants. In different 

 parts of the country names were applied ; and he would propose 

 that the Society should not recognize names which had been 

 brought to its notice unaccompanied by those drawings which 

 he would recommend. 



The President : Gentlemen, I think that although no 

 immediate practical result may come from our conversation and 

 discussion to-day, we have, at all events had placed before us 

 more clearly the difficulties of the case than we have had up to 

 the present time, and I think also we have had considerable in- 

 dications of the way in which those difficulties are to be met. 

 With regard to names, I believe men of science have up to the 

 present time, for reasons which are not difficult to understand, 

 chosen Latin or Greek for their descriptive names. How long 

 that will last, I cannot undertake to say. In fact, I have a rather 



