Distylium lanceolatum Chun

Chen, Feng & He, Hai, 2022, The historical relics in Chongqing Natural History Museum: An annotated checklist of original materials for 37 names of Chinese seed plants, Phytotaxa 530 (1), pp. 38-52 : 48

Distylium lanceolatum Chun in Cheng et al. (1936: 124), nom. invalid.

Type:— China. Guangxi [Kwangsi]: Luocheng Xian [Lucheng], [Mung Tung Kou], elev. ca. 360 m, 30 May 1928, R. C. Ching 5512 ( CQNM0015772 , NAS00344151 , NAS00344152 , NAS00344154 , NAS00344155 , NY00356131 , PE00029872 ).

Note: —This name has been considered inadvertently to be published by W. C. Cheng ( Walker 1944), to whom the authorship was ascribed (i.e., IPNI), and it has long been treated as a synonym of Distylium dunnianum H.Léveillé (1912: 12) in Chinese floras (Chang 1961, 1979, Zhang et al. 2003). However, when Cheng in Cheng et al (1936) commented on this name proposed by Chun (W. Y. Chun), he did not describe it with a diagnosis or description in Latin, where Art. 39.1 of ICN ( Turland et al. 2018) did not meet. Chang (1961) stated the diagnostic characters of “ D. lanceolatum Chun ” the same as D. dunnniaum and cited the Latin diagnosis of Léveillé (1912), but he merely listed the former as a synonym of the latter, where Art. 36.1 of ICN applied and Chang (1961) did not validate this name either. For the proposed type specimen of this name, the gathering R. C. Ching 5512 has duplicates in the above cited herbaria. We were not able to trace the locality of this gathering except for somewhere near a cave mouth (Tung Kou) 30–35 km north of Luocheng County, Northeast Guangxi. Further field observation is suggested to validate this name.