names for sale

[Joe Laferriere]

There is a danger in the idea of selling scientific names, i.e. that the
tendency will be toward excessive splitting in order to create more names
for sale. There are indeed precidents for this. During the late 19th and
early Centuries, there was a German gentleman named Suksdorf living in
Washington State, USA, supporting himself entirely by sale of seeds and
herbarium specimens. He could make more money if his specimens represented
new names, so he started his own journal to publish hundreds of new names.
I have seen the journal at Washington State University, and it is rather
funky: very brief descriptions in German. Some of his names are still used
today, but many, perhaps the majority, have long been rendered into
synonymy.