At 08:31 AM 3/31/2004 -0800, Mary Sue wrote: >I made an Acis page on the wiki using the information you have provided to >this group. Hopefully you will look it over and edit it and make any >changes that are necessary to have it be correct. And if it shouldn't be >Acis tingitana I hope someone else will correct the spelling for me. This >one never was published under Acis so I couldn't look at the IPNI site to >check on the spelling and how endings are decided has always been a >mystery to me. Jim McKenney speculated that the name, if derived from the proper name of the youth beloved by the nymph Galatea, should be masculine. However, it could also be from Greek akis 'arrow point, dart', which is feminine (hence tingitana, etc.). The tepals of Acis flowers are, of course, sharply pointed, and the buds are particularly like a leaf-shaped projectile point. Endings are decided based on the grammatical gender of the genus name, which may be masculine, feminine, or neuter. Usually species names get Latin endings even if the genus name is Greek, but one sometimes sees Greek endings -- I don't know if this is an older practice that has now been eliminated by the Code of Biological Nomenclature. However, it is good to look up the endings on species names (or "epithets," as they are called) rather than guessing, even if you know some Latin and Greek. Botanists even in the old days were not always sure of the grammatical gender (different from biological gender!) of the names they employed and sometimes made mistakes. In addition, the gender of a few Greek nouns varied from dialect to dialect. Moreover, some species epithets are not adjectives but nouns (e.g., Narcissus bulbocodium) and do not undergo agreement. If the species name is a possessive you need to look it up to find out if the honoree is male (e.g., nuttallii, lewisii) or female (eastwoodiae), or plural (Crocus baytopiorum, where the species is a possessive [genitive] plural noun, not a neuter singular adjective). Hope this helps. Jane McGary Editor, NARGS