64 Writings of Edward L. Greene. [ZOE 
possible, both as to character and station, and leave to others the 
unhappy task of finding out whether it is admissible or not. It 
is a well-known fact that genera and species can be launched 
with great ease, and that the process of disproving them is 
onerous and thankless, the more so as the distant investi- 
gator naturally defers somewhat to the one who is supposed to 
have intimate knowledge of the Jiving organism, and possibly to 
find differences which are masked in the dead one. 
Mr. Greene has described ‘‘as new” about 700 species, and 
resurrected something like the same number of groundless syno- 
nyms, nearly all relating to the Californian flora, and thus 
adding to our already inflated list at least 1000 names. It is 
safe to say that not more than one in ten of these species is 
tenable, and probably one in fifteen or twenty would be nearer 
the mark. 
In his earlier work, when he submitted his proposed species to 
the judgment of Dr. Gray or Dr. Watson, the proportion was 
much better, though the lapse of time and increasing knowledge 
of connecting forms is dealing hardly with many of those, and 
he has not escaped the suspicion of deliberately selecting the 
extremes and ignoring the intermediates. 
The underlying reasons of Mr. Greene’s devotion to ‘new 
species’’ are not far to seek. The most important one is his 
attitude concerning their origin. He openly contemns, as incon- 
sistent with the Mosaic record, the theory of evolution held in 
greater or less degree by almost all biologists, and proclaims his 
belief in the special creation and the fixity of species, taking 
occasional opportunity* to sneer at the misguided mortals who 
differ from him. How this belief affects his botanical teachings 
is evident at once. Rejecting the clue which would lead him 
through the tangled labyrinth of overlapping forms which so 
especially abound in the extreme variation of environment found 
on the western coast of North America, nothing is consistently 
left to him but to make a new species of every variation, no 
matter how trivial. ‘That he has not made five times as many is 
% “And if so is it another of that class of facts which our friends the 
evolutionists press into service, as indicating that species, and even genera, 
are created by soil, climate, or in one oft-repeated word, environment?’ 
