144 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM. 



One of the first works in which any attention was paid to the defi- 

 nition of type localities was Coville's Botany of the Death Valley 

 Expedition. Under each species listed there is given the locality in 

 which the original specimen was collected. Piper's Flora of Wash- 

 ington is another example of the same practice, while Miss Alice 

 Eastwood and Prof. A. A. Heller have published similar lists. Dr. 

 A. S. Hitchcock in some of the Contributions from the National Her- 

 barium has done some especially useful work of this kind for the 

 grasses. But, so far as the writer knows, no one has ever prepared a 

 list of the nature of the one here presented. It would be very difficult 

 to make such a compilation for one of the Eastern States because of 

 the obstacles mentioned, but in the case of the newer Western 

 States and Territories conditions are generally different. The 

 larger number of the western plants have been described by the later 

 botanists, Gray, Torrey, Greene, Watson, and others, who usually 

 have assigned a new species to a definite region and often to a certain 

 collection of a particular collector. Doctor Gray hardly considered 

 Wright's numbers which he cites in Plantae Wrightianae as "types" 

 in our sense of the word, but undoubtedly the} r were the plants 

 chiefly used in drawing up his descriptions, and they may therefore be 

 regarded as the types of his species. 



The writer believes that in this list of species described from New 

 Mexico the families from the first of the Bentham and Hooker 

 sequence to the end of the Compositae are rather completely repre- 

 sented, but that some species of the remaining families have probably 

 been overlooked. This results from the fact that in the two principal 

 works dealing with New Mexican botany, Plantae Fendlerianae and 

 Plantae W T rightianae, Doctor Gray treated only the former families. 

 Within them he described most of the new plants in the classic col- 

 lections of the earlier explorers of the southwestern flora. When we 

 look for the diagnoses of the new species described in the remaining 

 groups, we can find them in no one or two papers, but must look for 

 them in dozens of places scattered all through our botanical literature. 



This paper is designed to aid not only the herbarium student of 

 New Mexican botany but collectors in the Territory as well. It 

 will enable the latter to re-collect some of our species at their original 

 stations. To aid them, the localities have been defined as carefully 

 as possible and suggestions have been made in many cases regarding 

 the particular place in a region where a plant is likely to be found. 

 Some of the localities mentioned in the earlier reports are no longer 

 to be found on the map of New Mexico, and special attention has 

 been given to their location. Place names in the Southwest, as in 

 any new country, are continually changing, and it seems worth while 

 to leave a record of some of these changes before they are forgotten. 



