126 



Remarks on Camhojia Gut la, 



Jan.] 



seemly allusion conveyed under the new one. 1( MrnvBy^s Sialagmiiis 

 is on account of priority to supplant Roxburgh's Xantliochijmus, much 

 more must Linnaeus' Cambogia supplant Graham's Hebradendron, partly 

 for the same reason, priority, but principally, because Dr. Graham knew 

 when he gave the name, that his plant was identical with that of 

 LinucEus, while it was almost impossible that Roxburgh could ever 

 recognize his XanthocJvjmus in Murray's character of Stalaginitis, 

 made up as it is from two genera {Garcinia and Xanthocliymus) so dis- 

 tinct as not to be referable even to the same natural order. In my opini- 

 on Stalagmitis ought to be suppressed, and Xanthochijmiis retained." 



The allusion to Stalagmitis in this passage refers to the following sen- 

 tence, which I quote from Dr. Graham's paper — " It appears then that the 

 generic name of Xanthochymus must be dropped and that the species 

 which belonged to this genus must (for the future) receive the appella- 

 tion of Stalagmitis.'^ This reasoning seems to have carried conviction 

 to Dr. Lindley's mind, as he has acted upon it, so far as to append in his 

 Flora Medica the name Stalagmitis to our (Wight and Arnott's) chB.x?LC- 

 tei- of Xan^hochi/mus, as being the original and legitimate name of the 

 genus: but, apparently without due consideration, as, forgetting the 

 rights of priority in the case of Cambogia gutta of Linnaeus, he has fol- 

 low^ed Graham in quoting that name, without any doubt as to the identi- 

 ty of the plants, as a synonym for the very modem Hebradendron Gam- 

 hogioides of Graham. Upon what grounds this degree of favour is to be 

 shown to Hebradendron and withheld from Xanthochymus I am quite 

 unable to discover or even to conjecture : that Dr. Graham should have 

 inadvertently committed such an oversight is not so much to be wonder- 

 ed at, writing as he was under the excitement of having discovered the 

 long sought Gamboge plant, and the novelty of inventing new generic 

 names; but that Dr. Lindley should, in the retirement of his closet, and 

 totally uninfluenced by the stimulus under which Graham wrote, have 

 followed him without questioning the propriety of what he did, is to me 

 surprising. 



In my own and in the name of all working botanists, who are daily 

 called upon to unravel the mazes of involved and perplexed generic 

 names, I enter my protest against such unnecessary changing of names 

 in a science already overburthened with them, and one too which 

 must in its very nature become more and more so every day. To 

 have assigned the name of Hebradewhon Gambogioides to the very 

 plant which LinnjEus called Cambogia gutta, and then quote the ori- 

 ginal name as a synonym of the new one without doubt or ques- 

 tion as to the identity of the plants, I hold to be such, and there- 

 fore consider it a duty to express — in terms less measured than my 



