Latin names (was Re: HERB - Classes, was confession

[Kathleen H. Keeler]

Master Rauthulfr and everyone

 Datura Stramonium is it's full Latin
>name.
<snip>
> Atropa Belladonna,

The scientific name consists of two parts, genus and species.  Genus is
always capitalized, species is not capitalized in modern usage.  Both words
go in italics--which I can't do on this email program--because they are
foreign (Latin) words in an English text.  Handwritten, they are underlined
to indicate italics.

[caveat:  species names based on a person's name used to be capitalized,
and some people still do it that way _Prunus Besseyii_, Bessey's plum.  But
that is not considered good usage at present.]


[I don't know if its authors, editors or publishers who are responsible for
so many misusages, but they sure make it hard to learn the right way to do
it!]\

When people use the system correctly, the italics cues you to a scientific
name, lack of italics to a common name, so that if I write _Yucca_ you know
you can look it up in the Scientific Names index, but if I write aster, you
might want to be careful because although there is a genus _Aster_ a lot of
other genera get called "aster" as common names, when they are some other
genus of composite (_Erigeron_ is the one I can't tell from _Aster_).

I have an essay on common and scientific names online for my class
http://www-class.unl.edu within that I'm Arts and Sciences, BioSci
bios230/readings  ('The course is ecology of the great plains)
and you'll have to pick out the right reading 'cause I don't rememberquite
what I titled it (scientific names?). Sorry for the garbled reference-- I'm
in the field and can't readily check from here. If you are interested and
don't get there, say so -- I'll be back by early next week and can get the
full address.

cheers
Agnes
kkeeler1 at unl.edu


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