5H  Revision  of  the  U.  S.  Pharmacopoeia.  {^m^;SSxm' 
the  Linnaeus  Systema  of  1735.1  They  would  have  no  regard  for  the 
appropriateness,  or  what  Watson  has  termed  the  convenience  of  the 
name.  It  is  apparent  that  such  a  rule  destroys  stability  of  names, 
as  new  discoveries  of  older  names  would  cause  continual  changes. 
It  is  hoped  that  the  committee  were  aware  that  the  more  conserv- 
ative botanists,  whose  authority  had  been  heretofore  recognized, 
were  not  in  sympathy  with  these  radical  views  on  nomenclature. 
Asa  Gray  did  not  adopt  them  and  Sereno  Watson,  on  his  death-bed, 
took  occasion  to  dictate  an  article  giving  the  views  held  by  both 
Professor  Gray  and  himself  on  this  subject.  (See  the  Botanical 
Gazette,  June,  1892,  p.  169.) 
The  views  held  by  these  American  authors  were  substantially  those 
adopted  at  Kew.  Professor  Jackson,  of  that  institution,writes  (Britten's 
Journal  of  Botany,  1887,  p.  69) :  "  Our  practice  is  to  take  the  name 
under  which  any  given  plant  is  placed  in  its  true  genus  as  the  name 
to  be  kept  up,  even  though  the  author  of  it  may  have  ignored  the 
proper  rule  of  retaining  the  specific  name  when  transferring  it  from 
its  old  genus  to  the  new ;  when,  at  least,  such  name  is  not  already 
in  the  genus  receiving  the  accession.  To  wantonly  set  aside  the 
joint  name  thus  given  and  to  publish  a  new  name  by  joining  the 
oldest  specific  name  to  the  true  generic  is  a  mischievous  practice, 
which  should  never  be  condoned ;  it  is  adding  to  the  already  vast 
mass  of  useless  synonyms,  and  is  more  likely  to  be  the  offspring  of 
vanity  than  a  sincere  desire  to  promote  science." 
Sassafras  aptly  illustrates  the  two  methods  of  naming.  In  1836, 
Nees  rightly  named  the  plant  Sassafras  officinale,  and  this  name  has 
been  generally  adopted  since  and  recognized  in  the  past  editions  of 
the  Pharmacopoeia,  and  in  Gray's  Manual  and  other  American 
botanical  works.  Previous  to  this  Nuttall  had  applied  Evosmos 
albida  and  Linnaeus  Laurus  sassafras,  and  Salisbury,  in  1796,  Laurus 
variifolia.  Otto  Kuntze  now  proposes  as  the  correct  binomial 
(according  to  priority  only),  Sassafras  variifolium,  and  the  Pharma- 
copoeia of  1890  states  Sassafras  variifolium  (Salisbury),  O.  Kuntze, 
as  the  source  of  sassafras. 
It  is  now  a  matter  of  record,  that  the  very  meeting  that  adopted 
the  rules  in  the  Rochester  Convention  of  1892,  appointed  a  dele- 
gate to  attend  the  International  Botanical  Congress  held  in  Genoa,  in 
1  The  date  1753  will  most  likely  be  the  date  adopted  for  both  generic  and 
specific  names  by  an  international  agreement. 
