Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 12.djvu/266

236 changes of names, and speculations in classification. The former can only be permitted, if at all, to the most eminent leaders and reformers of botanical science, who may be capable of acquiring supreme authority in the latter.

The writer of this paper has never thought himself more directly pursuing the best objects of that Society, now so eminent, and so extensively useful, to whose service he has so long been devoted, than when employed in those practical investigations and criticisms, by which its "Transactions" are particularly distinguished. These subjects are so far from being exhausted, that scarcely any considerable genus of plants could be taken at random out of the Linnæan herbarium, without afiording matter for an ample dissertation.

The genus Tofieldia is known to have been involved in much confusion, as to its name and character; but no one seems aware of the still greater confusion, and intricate misapprehensions, which concern its species. I shall attempt to unravel both these subjects.

The late Mr. Dryander has well pointed out, in the second edition of Mr. Aiton's ''Hort. Kew. v''. ii. 324, that our present Tofieldia was the real and original Anthericum of Linnæus, in his Genera Plantarum, cd. i. 106. Accordingly it there stands in the Hexandria Trigynia. But in the second edition of the same work, published five years afterwards, the author combines, or rather confounds, with this genus his own Bilbine, Gen. Pl. ed. i. 95, as Tournefort had done before him. In the first edition of the Species Plantarum therefore Anthericum is a most heterogeneous assemblage; and so it continued in all the subsequent publications of the great Swedish botanist. Some things have been done in England still further to embroil, and some to reform it. The Hortus Kewensis, and Mr. Brown's Prodromus, stand nently