PRELIMINARY TREATISE. 
33 
ling, and men of science should set their faces decidedly 
against the practice, which Mr. De Candolle very inauspi- 
ciously sanctioned with respect to hybrid plants. Where 
garden varieties are much multiplied florist names ought to 
be used, as with hyacinths, tulips, &c. Hybrid plants which 
are found of spontaneous growth in the wild abodes of their 
parents should rank as species marked Hyb. Sp. or sponta- 
neous hybrid ; those of complicated or uncertain intermix- 
tures in our gardens should be marked as variety garden 
hybrid. It would very much tend to preclude confusion if 
ail substantive genitive cases were abandoned to cultivators 
for the distinction of their varieties, and the names of all 
species and permanent local varieties confined to adjectives. 
With this view I venture to alter all the proper names 
adopted in this order to an adjective form, writing Calda- 
siana for Caldasi ; and I earnestly press the convenience of 
this arrangement on the consideration of botanists, by which 
it may be understood at once that B. Caldasiana must be a 
species, or permanent local variety, and that B. Caldasi 
would designate a seminal or hybrid variety ; and as it will 
be vain to urge nurserymen not to dignify their productions 
with Latin names, I wish to request them to confine them- 
selves to genitive cases of proper names, names of romance 
or heathen deities, or of substances, as flammse instead of 
flammeus, eboris instead of eburneus ; and, if the botanical 
editors of popular periodical works will attend to this sug- 
gestion, we shall get rid of the overwhelming confusion which 
garden productions are creating. At present, in our best 
botanical catalogues, every seedling, Camellia Japonica, or 
Hippeastrum, is dignified with a Latin adjective name, and 
the endless garden intermixtures of Calceolarias are named 
like the natives of South America, very much to the disad- 
vantage of science. Cultivators will have an ample fund of 
names if all genitives are given up to them, and the change 
of the few genitives that have been used in the scientific 
nomenclature into the form of an adjective will produce no 
inconvenience. 
The kindred genera, also, of each order should be so 
arranged in different groups, having certain common fea- 
tures, that, if it should hereafter be found that two genera, 
now distinguished, are in fact identical, they would remain 
as sections of the leading genus without any disturbance of 
the arrangement or nomenclature. For instance, Phycella, 
D 
