146 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM. 



in taxonomic work since the middle forties who has not based one or 

 more of his names upon New Mexican material. 



In this list the specific name " neomexicanum" occurs rather fre- 

 quently. Doctor Gray seems to have been responsible for this com- 

 bination of Greek and Latin forms. The proper adjective, " novomexi- 

 canum,'" has been little used. One editor recently even went so far 

 as to object when Professor Wooton used the name " novomexicanum," 

 saying that " neomexicanum" was " the better or at least more usual." 



More than once this name has been mistakenly applied to plants 

 whose types really came from other regions and which in some 

 instances are not known to occur within the Territory. The most 

 glaring example of this is to be found in the case of two species of 

 Juncus named not very long ago; one, neomexicanus, was founded 

 upon material from Arizona, while the other, arizonicus, was based 

 upon a New Mexican collection. This may have been due to a slip 

 of the pen, otherwise it is inexcusable. 



For some cases of the misapplication of this name the authors 

 should not be blamed too harshly. Wright's labels for his collection 

 of 1849 read: "Collected on a journey from San Antonio, Texas, to 

 El Paso, New Mexico." Now, New Mexico at that time was a term 

 which included parts of Chihuahua, Texas, and Arizona, in addition 

 to its present territory. The El Paso thus referred to is not in New 

 Mexico and it is not El Paso, Texas, but the present town of Ciudad 

 Juarez, Chihuahua. No more reliance can be placed upon the 

 heading of Wright's labels for his collections made in 1851-52. 

 The labels of the Mexican Boundary Survey are equally deceptive; 

 they read: "Collected * * * chiefly in the valley of the Rio 

 Grande, below Donana." As a matter of fact, few of these boundary 

 plants came from New Mexico, most of them having been collected 

 in Texas. As a consequence of the wording of these two sets of 

 labels many new species have been described, which their authors, 

 sometimes through a lack of knowledge of these facts and sometimes 

 through ignorance of the geography of the Southwest, have assigned 

 to New Mexico, when the types really were collected sometimes hun- 

 dreds of miles outside the Territory's boundaries. Even now it is often 

 impossible for the best informed to tell whether some of Wright's 

 specimens came from New Mexico, from Texas, or from Mexico, 

 outside of the rare instances in which the exact locality happens to 

 be written upon the label. 



Some of the plants wrongly accredited to New Mexican territory 

 are referred to in this list, but there are many more that are not 

 mentioned. Sometimes it has been difficult to decide whether a 

 plant was based upon material from New Mexico or from some 

 other State or Territory; some of these cases are discussed here, but 



