The Latin Babble

This chapter covers a collaborative project between Mary Strong Clemens, a US plant collector, and Elmer D. Merrill, one of the most revered US botanists of the Philippines, toward the revision of Portuguese botanizing friar João de Loureiro’s Flora cochinchinensis published in 1790. Merrill relied on Clemens to collect material and local knowledge in French Indochina to update Flora cochinchinensis, an extensive flora of present-day Vietnam and southern China. A presiding member of the International Botanical Congress, Merrill critiqued international botany practice that failed to account for local plant names—a position reinforced by his time in the Philippines. For generations, the nomenclatural vernacular necessitated the creation of a global language to bring comprehensibility to the Babel of local names, a characterization used by scientists and historians alike. This chapter focuses, instead, on a moment when a vernacular exposed the Latin babble: the diachronic capricious use of Latin binomials.