48 



THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



Back into the old box had gone the perfume of these two 

 flowers, when I visited with a friend some woods on the 

 lower Cape Fear river in April of 1901. ''I want to find 

 foryou," she said, "the sweetest flower in North Carolina. 

 We call it a blue-bell and its breath is of rare old spices." 

 At last along a ditch it was found growing in a tangle 

 over brush and black-berry vines, but the buds had to be 

 picked open — the Clematis crispal When I reached Vir- 

 ginia I received a letter containing the blossoms and the 

 envelope held a perfume like that of the beech-drop. Here, 

 too, on the Dismal Swamp Canal, I was taken to see the 

 rarest of flowers of this region, according to a botanical 

 expert from Washington, it was the "North Carolina blue- 

 beU." 



In the summer a few of the roots sent to Wisconsin 

 had been carefully nursed in pots and one blossomed. 

 The apios is easily cultivated, but can this clematis stand 

 our northern winters ? A plant lover in Durham, North 

 Carolina, said it took kindty to cultivation in that state. 



Cincinnati, Ohio. 



PERSONAL NAMES IN NOMENCLATURE. 



As is well known to readers of my publication, "My- 

 cological Notes," my views on the subject are very radi- 

 cal. I advocate strongly the discontinuance in current 

 literature of the use of personal names after the names of 

 plants. I believe that the custom of citing personal names 

 is conducive to more harm, more confusion, more 53^- 

 onyms, more invalid "new species," more changing of old 

 names, than all other agencies combined. It is not denied 

 by any one that the various names we have for a plant, 

 (synonyms), are both a great weight and a great hind- 

 rance to the science. Botanists meet and pass rules for 

 the naming of plants, but they cannot agree on any set 

 of rules, and never will as long as the members are vitally 

 interested in the particular rules that perpetuate their 

 own names and the plant names that have been proposed 

 by themselves. 



