In reference to the omnipresent vexed question of nomenclature, a word is perhaps necessary. De Candolle's rule, "The first authentic specific name published under the genus in which the species now stands," may be true philosophy, but it is certainly an open question how that rule shall be applied. If an author recognized and defined a given species in times past, and, in accordance with views then held, assigned the species to a particular genus, common honesty, it would seem, would require that his work be recognized. To assume that any later writer who may choose to set to familiar genera limits unknown before shall thereby be empowered to write all species so displaced his own, as if, forsooth, now for the first time in the history of science published or described, is not only absolutely and inexcusably misleading, but actually increases by just so much the amount of _debris_ with which the taxonomy of the subject is already cumbered. In face of a work so painstaking and voluminous as that of Rostafinski, and in view of the almost universal confusion that preceded him, it would seem idle to change for reasons purely technical the nomenclature which the Polish author has established. Especially is this true in the case of organisms so very perishable and fragile as those now in question where comparative revision is apt to result in uncertainty. We had preferred to leave the Rostafinskian, _i. e._ the heretofore current nomenclature, untouched; but since other writers have preferred to do otherwise, we are compelled to recognize the resultant confusion. Slime-moulds have long attracted the attention of the student of nature. For nearly two hundred years they find place more or less definite in botanical literature. Micheli, 1729, figures a number of them, some so accurately that the identity of the species is hardly to be questioned. Other early writers are Buxbaum and Dillenius. But the great names before Rostafinski are Schrader, Persoon, and Fries. Schrader's judgment was especially clear. In his _Nova Genera_, 1797, he recognizes plainly the difference between slime-moulds and everything else that passed by the name of fungus, and proposed that they should be set off in a family by themselves,[2] but he suggested no definite name. Nees (C. G.) also made the same observation in 1817, and proposed the name _Aerogastres_; but he cites as type of his aerogastres, _Eurotium_, and includes so many fungi, that it seems unsafe now to approve his nomenclature. Schrader also has left an excellent account of the cribrarias, the basis of all that has since been attempted in that genus.