376 Systematic Botany. [20K 
when we see a new monograph from men who would not know 
their own new species if they saw them alive, and we find them 
bristling with botanical sports as new species, sports which field 
study would have avoided. A certain genus recently mono- 
graphed I tried to use and found that I had to open a seed vessel 
on every plant that grew in a certain patch and all nianifestly 
from the same seed; out of the patch I had to make about three 
species. Some years ago I had the same laughable experience 
in patches of Beeria in California, also in patches of Layia; and 
two years ago I had the same experience with Townsendia, out 
of which I had to make two species from the same seed, and had 
a quantity of nondescript material left still waiting to be chris- 
tened. There are dozens of genera that are as badly tangled as 
these. 
I think this confusion has arisen primarily from the absence 
of field study on the part of the author of the species, and 
secondarily from carelessness in describing species, coupled with 
a false theory that paucity of words is conciseness. ‘The most 
concise botanist of the last generation was the one who used the 
most words in describing his species, and the most verbose were 
the ones who seemed to delight in what they called ‘‘ short and 
concise’’ descriptions, which have proved to be only epitaphs of 
unknown species buried in their herbaria, and which we western: 
men now and then duplicate from no fault of ours. In the first 
place, few of us can afford to go East to find out what these 
species are like, and in the second place, we are not responsible 
for the sins of our botanical fathers and grandfathers who have 
caused this state of things. That we have kept up with the 
literature of the day and have used every means in our power to 
avoid mistakes goes without saying, and some of us have even 
gone East to study types, but it is a hardship that should not 
be required of us. Let the closet botanist first describe his own 
species so that they can be recognized by the descriptions alone 
before he attempts to make new ones for the field botanist, else 
he will cause to become a conviction what is now arising as a 
suspicion that imperfect descriptions are not due wholly to igno- 
tance. it is not possible to get accurate descriptions of 
western species made by closet botanists, then eastern botan- 
