Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/324

 298 NOTES ON THE INDEX KEWENSIS. By Dr. Otto Kuntze. Having inserted the + 5000 ''addenda et emendanda" from page 1257-1299 into the body of the Kew Index with its + 375,000 names and references, I may say that 1| per cent, corrections is so low a rate that we ought to admire the Kew Index if there were no more. Indeed the bibliographical work of Mr. Jackson cannot be sufficiently appreciated. But through Sir Joseph Hooker's partly wrong direction of the Kew Index there are, from out of the about 120,000 names accepted as valid at least 20,000 false, and there are other great defects iu the Kew Index. I would not like to return to criticisms already printed in this Journal, although the omission of the first publication-dates to the species and the omission of the synonyms at the right place, namely under the valid species-names, is felt deeply ; Steudel's Nomenclator with its synonyms in the right place must still be used for searching synonyms, and this work has not been replaced by the Kew Index as it was the wish of Darwin that it should be. I want to mention some points not yet criticised, that I noticed when inserting the 5000 corrections. All varieties are omitted and that is very wrong, because many varieties are considered by other authors as species. All hybrids are not named by their proper names : (the com- bination of parent-names) but only by synonyms in italics. All names of subgenera are omitted, although in case of need they are valid substitutes for invalid genera-names, as has been done sometimes in Bentham & Hooker's Genera Plantarum. All Cryptogams are missing. I am not sure if it was the original plan of Darwin, who wished a renewed Steudel's Nomenclator, to exclude the Cryptogams as Sir Joseph Hooker did, who is only responsible for the direction of the work. But there exists indeed, at least to the first edition of Steudel's Nomenclator a second part for Cryptogams published 1824. The authors of the Linnean period are poorly or not at all extracted as to genera-names, e. g. Miller's Gardeners' Dictio7iaries, Haller's Enumeratio Stirpium Helvetiae etc, etc. Only Boehmer's edition of Ludwig's DeJinitlo7ies generiun plantarum of 1760 has been taken more in consideration in the "addenda," whereas the first and second edition of 1737 and 1747 has been used only sometimes. Even Linnaeus' opus princeps, the Systema plantarum of 1735, was formerly extracted for the Kew Index in a quite insufficient manner and there are given many "addenda" found in my Revi.no generum plantarum. As my Rev. gen. pi. was published after 1885, Mr. Jackson was perhaps not obliged to extract from it the names over- looked by him, but I have found among the "addenda " the following ones for the first 3 parts of the Kew Index; they are taken out of my Rev. gen. pi., as there are several genera-names with corrected determinations made at first in my book, e. g. Acosta Lour., Michelia L. 1735 non 1737, Sutera 1807 non 1821 etc. (The list is not com-