CERTAIN MALVACEOUS TYPES. 205 
authors have done for Caesalpino, Columna, Ray, Tournefort, Lin- 
naeus, and then stop—thaż is to really honor a man, while to use 
his name as a merely convenient foundation for the making of 
a dozen different names—is not that to openly dishonor him ? 
I respectfully commend this topic to the serious consideration 
of the next International Congress of Botanists. 
Certain Malvaeous Types. 
The very many herbs and shrubs of far-western and south- 
western North America that have been distributed between 
Sphaeralcea and Malvastrum are much in need of recension. Of 
this I have long been convinced; the conviction having come 
from a long study of the various types in their native soil; a 
much more prolonged acquaintance with them in this way than 
any other botanist ever has enjoyed. 
The essential characters, no less than the strong habital pecu- 
liarities of several groups, have long been fixed in my mind; 
but I can not yet satisfy myself as to whether we have or have 
not a single species of real Sphaera/cea or a genuine Malvastrum 
in all North America, If these are wanting here, then we have 
at least two more North American genera of Malvaceae that 
remain undefined over and above those herein proposed. 
Those that with us have been called Sphaeralcea species are 
of two ecologic groups, one of the arid districts of the far South- 
west, companions of the Cactaceae, and geographically coexten- 
sive as a group, with that family, and the desert Salsolaceae. It is 
in this assemblage only that we find species with the habit of typ- 
ical South American Sphaeralcea. That any of them have the 
floral or carpological characters of that genus is what I can not yet 
determine, 
As widely different from this group in habit as can be, and also 
of totally different habitat, are the types of a few northwestern 
plants, at first called Ma/va species, but after that transferred 
to Sphaeralcea. The habitat of these is the banks or borders 
of mountain streams or other very moist places at consider- 
