Musa uranoscopos Lour., 1875

Häkkinen, Markku & Väre, Henry, 2008, Typification and check-list of Musa L. names (Musaceae) with nomenclatural notes, Adansonia (3) 30 (1), pp. 63-112 : 104

291. Musa uranoscopos Lour. , nom. illeg. superfl.

Flora Cochinchinensis: 645 (1790).

REMARKS

In his diagnosis Loureiro (1790) wrote: “quae Musa troglodytarum Lin. sp. 3”, meaning “this is Musa troglodytarum of Linnaeus sp. 3”. Apparently Loureiro did not like the name M. troglodytarum L. (“banana of the cave-dwellers”), and rehabilitated M. uranoscopos Rumph. ( uranoscopos “star-gazing”; Rumphius 1747: 137). According to the Code ( McNeill et al. 2006: Art. 7.5) such a superfluous illegitimate name is automatically typified by the type of the name which ought to have been adopted under the Code, as Loureiro did not designated his own specimen as a “ type ”. Liu et al. (2002) also stated, that the name M. uranoscopos Lour. is not valid. Their reasoning was wrong, however. They refer to the Code ( McNeill et al. 2006: Art. 53.1) dealing with later homonyms. They claimed that according to Loureiro (1793) M. uranoscopos Rumph. ( Rumphius 1747) is not different from M. paradisiaca L. and M. sapientum L. However, Loureiro wrote: “Differt. spec. Mus. [Differt speciebus Musa ] racemo erecto: spathis partialibus sub-bifloris: fructu compresso, polyspermo”, meaning “differs from [other] Musa species by the erect raceme, by the partial [secondary?] mostly 2-flowered spathae and by the compressed, multi-seeded fruit”, and “At M. paradisiaca & M. sapientum inter se species non differunt, cum earum notae non verificentur, nex meliores invenio in tota Musa cliffortiana , quamvus amplissima”, meaning “but M. paradisiaca and M. sapientum does not differ from each others, as their distinguishing characters cannot be confirmed, I prefer to unite these as in a single broadly circumscribed species M. cliffortiana ”. According to Stafleu & Cowan (1981) the second part of Flora Cochinchinensis was published in 1793.