the fern bulletin 



69 



yond which no botanist should go in digging up for- 

 gotten names, but alas for human instability, the con- 

 gress which met at Brussels five years after the^e rules 



were made, added a few amendments of its own. It 



declined to call 1753 the starting point for the nomen- 

 clature of all groups and now proposes no less than 



twenty starting points. It is small wonder that the 

 plant student fails to go far on the road to stability 

 when we consider his numerous starting places.. An- 

 other thing the Vienna congress did was to establish 

 a list of nomina conservanda, that is, a list of plants 

 that are exempt from changes of name without regard 

 to priority. The Brussels congress increased this list, 

 to the great delight of plant students and the corres- 

 ponding disgust of those whose chief aim in life 

 seems to be the rearranging of plants under different 

 names. The average plant student usually cares little 

 what name a plant bears so long as it is permanent, the 

 name tinker, on the other hand, loses all interest in any 

 species that can not be jarred loose from its scientific 

 cognomen at least once a year. 



Why should anybody care anything about priority? 

 Well, it gives them an object in living if it serves no 

 other use. A good many species makers claim they 

 are interested in seeing justice done to the bptanizers, 

 plant collectors and herb doctors of an ancient day, but 



there is a large-sized suspicion abroad that they are 

 more interested in see'ng that credit is given to name- 

 tinkers of the present. Those beautiful rules of both 

 the Vienna anl "American" codes offer great induce: 

 merits to the plant-jugglers to continue their abomin- 

 able practices. In effect they rule that anyone who 

 shall take a plant from one genus, put it in another 



