As noted some time ago in The American Garden, the most dry-boned botanist is glad to find that a plant has a good popular name, and invariably uses the popular name when it has become really popular. If they could be controlled as botanical names are controlled, there never would be a word said against them. Botanists have agreed among themselves that the earliest name as recorded in any reputable work, shall be the one to be generally adopted. We often find plants with several botanical names given in ignorance of previous descriptions or from some other cause, but as soon as an accepted name is shown to be more recent than another, that other, the older one, is taken up in place of the more recent one.

In relation to popular names there has never been any attempt to insist on priority. Indeed, the very same authority will forget its own names, and in a few years speak of something under name already recorded in connection with some other plant. A few years ago I was reading in an excellent English magazine, one that prides itself in stirring up botanical pedantry, a pretty account of the artillery plant. Pilea muscosa never had an English name before. We adopted it and put it in our catalogues. The same magazine is now full of artillery plant articles, but they refer to begonias now. Those who read of these artillery plants, and then send for some from our catalogue, and get a pretty lycopodium-like plant instead of a begonia, are likely to believe our firm a fraud. My stand has never been against popular names. I like them. I protest only against the immense flood of counterfeits sent into circulation with the genuine coin. - Thomas Meehan.