What’s in a latin name?: Cycas wadei & the politics of nomenclature

Abstract

This history piece analyzes colonial-era correspondence and botany publications fascinated with Cycas wadei, a cycad observed only to grow on the island of Culion in the province of Palawan. First spotted in 1902 by U.S. botanist Elmer D. Merrill, the cycad became the preoccupation of U.S. and Filipino scientists alike. It took nearly three and a half decades before the species was introduced in the Philippine Journal of Science in 1936 as C. wadei, named after Herbert W. Wade, head physician of the Culion leper colony established by the U.S. colonial government at the turn of the century. Tracking the history of this species—from its first sighting to its debut before the international botany community—reveals much about the institutional workings of colonial science in the Philippines in the years leading up to the Commonwealth era. It further inspires us to take stock of the ways in which the politics of Latin binomial nomenclature of a species can be historicized across scales of human and institutional interaction. Such an intellectual practice can help us continue to shed light on the history of taxonomy in the Philippines.