364 ee 
which controlled the earlier issues of the work nearly twenty 
years ago. The intervening time in its almost revolutionary 
upheaval and advance cannot be slighted, and any work of the 
present day which does not sufficiently recognize it must fail of 
quite the position it might otherwise attain. The attitude regardant 
has its graces but alsois not without its dangers. If in the present ~ 
case it has made it the more difficult to discern the value of recent 
advanced work in discrimination it is all the more regrettable since © 
a major part of such work, at least in phanerogamic botany, has 
clearly been done in a spirit of conservatism not the less regard- 
ful of the truth of nature because moving more freely in the 
broader lights of the present day. 
It may well be questioned whether the idea that a species is 
after all but a conception of the individual mind has not been car- 
tied too far. At best the doctrine expresses only a half-truth 
and in practice gives a wide range of liberty either destructive or 
creative according to the bent of each new systematist. More pro- 
found even than the phenomena of change and development result- 
ing in intergradation, is the mysterious fact of fixity of type reveal- 
ing itself in a certain all but invincible individuality. This in many 
an organism we find surviving the most diverse environments and 
remaining unperturbed amid a crowding pressure of other types 
visually so similar that only a practiced eye and understanding 
can perceive them to be different. A clear apprehension of such 
facts as these may well give us pause when tempted to discredit 
the conclusions of any student who may have had greater advan- 
tages or employed greater industry then ourselves in the investi- 
gation of any particular group. The too ready reduction of critical 
species which the future will only reinstate can only have the 
effect of impairing the prestige of an author and limiting the au- 
thority of his work. 
However inapplicable these strictures may be to very much 
in the work before us which is incontestably of a high order of 
excellence, we wish particularly to disclaim their application to 
the treatment of the genus Vitis. This is truly a piece of con- 
structive work of conspicuous merit both in larger modelling and 
lesser detail. The simple order which has here been resolved out 
of the veritable bacchanalian confusion into which our grapes had 
