WESTERN BUCKTHORNS 63 
may be permitted to question. Certainly also, the inexperienced, 
if they will, may make phrases in laudation of inexperience. 
What a certain one of the reviewer’s “ great European syste- 
matists” has had to say respecting the Campanulacee and 
Cichoriaceæ as allied, I have read. The reading does not take 
long; and the writing would seem to have been that of a man 
who had not himself made any study of the plants themselves 
from this point of view; even whose reading of what the fore- 
fathers, Jussieu, De Candolle, Lindley and Bentham have said, 
had been but partial, and cursory at that; such a perusal as 
neither deeply instructed him, nor at all deterred him from 
assigning the Cichoriacee a place which, although I dare say 
he knew it not, is just that given them two hundred years ago 
by the authorities of that period, Tournefort, Ray, Haller and 
others. 
We have no great American systematists. But there is hope 
in our future, so long as we have two or three who, like the late 
Dr. Porter and the living authors of the most complete and 
valued manuals of East American botany, dare dissent from 
what I am wont to think of as German artificialism, in so far 
as to locate the Cichoriacee where nature indicates that they 
belong. 
Some Western Buckthorns. 
RHAMNUS FASCICULATA. Shrub with very stout and rigid 
branches dark-colored, glabrous after the first season, the grow- 
ing ones pubescent; densely leafy and the foliage of the smallest, 
deciduous though perhaps tardily so: leaves obovate-oblong, 
oblong and elliptical, the smaller ł inch long, the largest 14 
inches, obtuse or acutish, firmly and rather sharply serrulate, 
green above, yellowish beneath, sparsely pubescent on both faces, 
the hairs spreading and hirtellous, especially along the midvein 
beneath: flowers not seen: fruit small, 2-seeded. 
White Mountains, New Mexico, 25 July, 1897, E. O. Wooton, 
allied to R. Smithii. s 
RHAMNUS URsINA. Rigid shrub with many divergent bran- 
ches and rather loosely leafy, deciduous, the growing branches 
and the leaves beneath whitish with a minute and dense tomen- 
