Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/416

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COMPOUND

A great and just complaint has arisen in my time among the cultivators of botany, who found the names of many garden plants, with which they had long been conversant, altered for others without any apparent cause, and in many instances for the worse; as Aristolochia macrophylla, an excellent and expressive name, for a very unappropriate one, A. Sipho. For this I am obliged to censure my much regretted and very intelligent friend L'Heritier. When he came to England to reap the rich harvest of our undescribed plants, he paid no respect to the generic or specific names by which Dr. Solander or others had called them, because those names were not printed; but he indulged himself, and perhaps thought he confirmed his own importance, by contriving new ones; a factitious mode of gaining celebrity, to which his talents ought to have been infinitely superior. Nor would it have been easy to say how far this inconvenient plan of innovation might have extended, had not the Hortus Kewensis come forth to secure our remaining property.

I have only to add a few words respecting