neuters in 'e' will be admitted.

15. Participial terminations (Impatiens), with neuters in 'en' (Cyclamen),
will always be descriptive of some special quality or form,--leaving it
indeterminate if good or bad, until explained. It will be manifestly
impossible to limit either these neuters, or the feminines in 'is' to Latin
forms; but we shall always know by their termination that they cannot be
generic names, if we are strict in forming these last on a given method.

16. How little method there is in our present formation of them, I am
myself more and more surprised as I consider. A child is shown a rose, and
told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Rosaceous';[52] he is next
{186} shown a lily, and told that he is to call every flower like that,
'Liliaceous';--so far well; but he is next shown a daisy, and is not at all
allowed to call every flower like that, 'Daisaceous,' but he must call it,
like the fifth order of architecture, 'Composite'; and being next shown a
pink, he is not allowed to call other pinks 'Pinkaceous,' but 'Nut-leafed';
and being next shown a pease-blossom, he is not allowed to call other
pease-blossoms 'Peasaceous,' but, in a brilliant burst of botanical
imagination, he is incited to call it by two names instead of one,
'Butterfly-aceous' from its flower, and 'Pod-aceous' from its seed;--the
inconsistency of the terms thus enforced upon him being perfected in their
inaccuracy, for a daisy is not one whit more composite than Queen of the
meadow, or Jura Jacinth;[53] and 'legumen' is not Latin for a pod, but
'siliqua,'--so that no good scholar could remember Virgil's 'siliqua
quassante legumen,' without overthrowing all his Pisan nomenclature.

17. Farther. If we ground our names of the higher orders on the distinctive
characters of _form_ in plants, these are so many, and so subtle, that we
are at once involved in more investigations than a young learner has ever
time to follow successfully, and they must be at all times liable to
dislocations and rearrangements on the discovery of any new link in the
infinitely entangled {187} chain. But if we found our higher nomenclature
at once on historic fact, and relative conditions of climate and character,
rather than of form, we may at once distribute our flora into unalterable
groups, to which we may add at our pleasure, but which will never need
disturbance; far less, reconstruction.

18. For instance,--and to begin,--it is an historical fact