IOWA ACADEMY OP SCIENCES. 
101 
be left to woods as to their appropriate crop. The loess clay 
will never enable its cultivator to compete with his more 
fortunate fellow- citizen who farms the drift, and the sooner 
the people of Iowa find it out the better. (2) It is likely that 
orchards and vineyards will thrive better on the loess than on 
the drift, as trees generally may be supposed to have been sub- 
ject to similar discipline in all time and in all parts of the 
world. 
THE NOMENCLATURE QUESTION AMONG THE SLIME- 
MOULDS. 
BY T. H. MACBRIDE. 
That a man’s difficulties are often of his own creating is a 
fact patent in science as in other fields. The imperfections of 
our methods form ever increasing nets of complexity about the 
feet of our progress. No one feels this more keenly than the 
naturalist, especially he who would attempt to give more 
exact account of some limited group or series of animals or 
plants. No matter how carefully he may arrange his materi- 
als, no matter how industriously he may have worked out the 
various problems of structure and morphology, there comes at 
last to plague him, to hinder him, to mar his purpose and 
waste his time, the question of nomenclature; his specimens 
must be named. This ceremony, the christening, which ought 
to have been the simplest matter in the world, has really 
become, if not the most difiicult, at least the most annoying 
and thankless portion of his task. Preposterous also as it may 
seem, it is precisely the oldest and most universally recognized 
of the forms vzith which he deals that £ire apt to give the most 
trouble. There has arisen a class of critics among us who 
have devoted their energies to the unsettling of scientific 
nomenclature in every department of research, with the result 
that, rightly or wrongly, every systematic work in the world 
needs revision if not re-writing, and every herbarium in the 
world needs a new set of labels. Now, this might all not be so 
bad if such a revolution were final. If the wheel were only 
weighted on one side, so that once it came to rest we could feel 
