337 
New Honors to Old Weeds. 
By Epw. L. GREENE. 
The modern history of Californian botany was taken up by men 
who had never seen the field of their researches, and who had no 
conception of the number of foreign plants that had become 
naturalized in this part from Europe a hundred years ago. Many 
of these had not made their appearance in New England, and 
were unfamiliar to New England botanists. Several such plants, 
well-known to botanists in general for several centuries, obtained 
new names at the hands of writers of the East, as if they had been 
quite new to science. Dr. Britton, in the last issue of this jour- 
nal, has been able to identify as old, one of my own supposed 
new plants; and IJ may here be allowed to indicate that botanists of 
note have added to synonymy in this manner, before me. Asa 
Gray, in his day, gave new names to not less than five extremely 
common and familiar weeds of the Old World, the specimens of 
which had come to him from this unsuspected habitat of California. 
When, nearly twenty years ago, the present writer sent him 
Convolvulus arvensis from California, his letter in answer shows 
that he had considered this to be an exclusively Californian species, 
the C Californicus, of Choisy; and when, a few weeks later, the 
real C. Californicus was transmitted, he named this C. So/danella, 
an Old World species. But errors of this kind, of which he and 
other so-called “authorities” on West American botany have 
made scores and hundreds, do not come directly under my head- 
ing, being errors that did not go into print. The Old World 
Convolvulus to which Dr. Gray gave.a new name, as a new species, 
and in the wrong genus at that, is a grain field weed, as common 
in California as in Europe—C. pentapetaloides, Linn., which he 
Named Breweria minima (Proc. Am. Acad. xvii. 228). This error 
he some years afterward discovered and corrected. But there is 
One seeming more inexcusable which has not yet been corrected, 
_ though it was detected by me while Dr. Gray was still living; for 
I was loath to call his attention to a mistake, the discovery of 
Which by another would naturally be somewhat humiliating. I 
refer to a new name that he gave toa plant of such ancient and 
ee 
