Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/333

 BIBLIOGKAPHICAL NOTES. 807 scientific principle of priority the finishing of the Kew Index has been unfair. Even Mr. Jackson found often older names to be renewed, if he were allowed to do so according to his early promise ; so he wrote only thereto : nonien priiis ! But Mr. Dyer is innocent of that unfair finishing, for, so far as I know, he scarcely gave any line to the Kew Index ; although a good director of Kew Gardens, he is neither an experienced specialist in nomenclature nor a working systematist, as I showed already in Eev. gen. pi. ccci/iii. The quoted speech of Mr. Dyer in 1895 finished such : — "All that can be hoped is a general agreement amongst the stafifs of the principal institutions in different countries where systematic botany is worked at; the free-lances must be left to do as they like." Mr. Stapf translated free-lances into German with Wilde. Till now the Kew botanists always refused to work in agreement of nomenclature with any other botanical institution or Congress ! Now Mr. Dyer insults the 80-90 % of botanists, who do not agree with the Kew- nomenclature as free-lances or Wilde. Does Mr. Dyer not know that science was often more promoted by ''free-scientists" than by business-botanists in high position ? Even if Mr. Dyer would be willing and able to obtain such an agreement, it would not be possible to base it on the Kew Index, of which the validity of names has been justly doubted by himself. Moreover the most prominent botanic institutions have such different and arbitrary nomenclatures that no agreement between them is possible, inasmore as some directors of such institutions do not like to correct the wrong nomenclature of their works. They could only be corrected by the majority of other botanists and surely that will be done in future. The confusion in nomenclature is now too large everywhere and locally ; in Berlin, e. g. different names for the same genus are sometimes used by several officers of the botanic Museum and others published in the same time two different names to the same new plants : the arbitrary and the international name ! Only an international competent Congress with the necessary preparation can bring order into botanic nomenclature by a way shown in my paper: '* Les besoins de la nomenclature botanique." BIBLIOGKAPHICAL NOTES. XII. — The Dates of Rees's Cyclopedia. [The following paper, issued privately at the end of last year by Mr. B. D. Jackson, is here reprinted with his permission. The information in square brackets is additional to the original publi- cation, and is taken from Mr. B. B. Woodward's notes in the copy of the paper in the Natural History Museum. — Ed. Journ. Bot.] It is nearly nineteen years since I first endeavoured to discover the actual dates on which the several parts of Rees's Cyclopaedia were issued. In the Journal of Botany, April, 1877, 107, 108, I printed all I had then been able to ascertain.