The Scientific Notebooks of German Orchidologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Kränzlin

[PROC. ROY. SOC. VICTORIA, 20 (N.S.), PT. II., 1907.]

ART. XI.—Contributions to the Flora of Australia, No. 7.1

BY ALFRED J. EWART, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.L.S.,

Government Botanist and Professor of Botany at the Melbourne University.

[Read 14th November, 1907.]

Latin in Systematic Botany.

At the last Botanical Congress, held at Vienna in 1905, on the whole a salutary check was administered to the objectionable tendencies of modern systematists in certain quarters, especially as regards frivolous changes of name, and it is, in fact, a matter of regret that the list of protected names was not greatly increased. On the other hand, it is impossible to follow Mr. Maiden2 when he states that botanists are as bound by these laws as by those of their own country, and must follow these laws whether they approve of them or not. For this to be requisite the Congress would need to be a really representative one, to which all botanists sent elected representatives. At present it is a fortuitous concourse almost soley of systematists, among whom the local interests of the country in which the Congress is held are always unduly strongly reprensented. So far as I am aware, botanists from the south of the Equator were entirely unrepresented, and plant physiologists and anatomists were conspicuous by their absence. Yet the man who has intimately investigated the structure and properties of a plant has a greater claim to decide that its name shall not be altered than the systematist whose interest in the plant largely ceases as soon as it is labelled, and is often only revived when a chance of relabelling it occurs.

1 No. 6 in Proc. Roy. Soc. Vict, 1907, vol. 20, p. 76. 2 Jour. Roy. Soc. N.S. Wales, vol. xl., 1906, p. 74.