In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| Only some of the old names are valid. Botanists standardised the names
| of higher taxa as being based on a genus (not necessarily a currently
| excepted genus - hence Caryophyllaceae and Theaceae), with standardised
| terminations, such as -aceae for families (beforehand you'd have forms
| such as Berberideae, rather than Berberidaceae), and grandfathered in a
| few widely used descriptive family names - Gramineae, Legumiosae,
| Compositae, Cruciferae, Guttiferae, Umbelliferae, Labiatae, Compositae,
| Palmae and Papilionaceae/Papilionoideae. Other such names, such as
| Columniferae (Malvaceae) or Culmineae (Tiliaceae?) aren't valid.

Ah. Thanks for the correction. What I (and many others) object to
isn't those rules, which are as sensible as many others, but (a) NOT
using those established names with standardised endings and (b) often
requiring changes when indicative genera are abolished or moved.

| I seem to recall that there is a proposal to remove the remaining
| descriptive family names, as they are now rarely used in botanical
| works, except for Palmae. (They're is a proposal to allow Palmaceae, as
| Arecaceae is a bit similar to Araceae.)

Oh, God :-(

Legumiosae about 2,000,000
Fabaceae about 2,820,000

Labiatae about 740,000
Lamiaceae about 828,000

Umbelliferae about 463,000
Apiaceae about 606,000

As with Viburnum fragrans, the confusion caused by that will take many
decades to die away.

| I would have thought that changes of family names followed more from
| changes to classification than to following the rules of the ICBN. For
| example the names you give for Leguminosae are all alternatives, but
| follow from disagreement as to whether to consider the clade one family
| or three.

They do but, in cases such as that, the rules are such that relatively
localised reclassifications cause disruption far beyond the area of the
change. That is a great advantage of the old descriptive names; not
being tied to a genus, there is no need to change them just because one
genus gets moved.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.