1898.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 291 



NOTES ON MR. THOMAS MEEHAN'S PAPER ON THE PLANTS OF LEWIS 

 AND CLARK'S EXPEDITION ACROSS THE CONTINENT, 1804-06. 



BY DR. ELLIOTT COUES. 



Many years ago I prepared for publication in these Proceedings 

 a paper on the plants of Fort Macon, N. C. It never appeared, 

 because I submitted it to Professor Asa Gray, who told me it was a 

 very good one, but asked me what was the use of printing it. Taking 

 the hint to heart, I have from that day to this curbed any aspira- 

 tions I may have felt to botanical authorship ; and it now behooves 

 me to explain why I presume to have anything to say on a botani- 

 cal subject. In fact, I do not now write on Lewis and Clark's 

 plants, but solely on the localities where their plants were procured. 

 I do not pretend to any knowledge of botany, but if there is any- 

 thing I do know, it is exactly where Lewis and Clark were on every 

 day, almost every hour, from start to finish of their famous expedi- 

 tion. Consequently, I can give the precise locality of every speci- 

 men which bears a date in the herbarium that Mr. Meehan recently 

 discovered to be still extant, and thus available for the determina- 

 tion of so many of the type specimens of Pursh's species. This 

 discovery seems to me one of the happiest and most important that 

 could have been made, and I doubt not that Mr. Meehan's identifi- 

 cations of these plants, with the assistance of Messrs. Robinson and 

 Greenman, will be justly regarded as a boon to working botanists. 

 I could wish that these writers had effected what I conceive should 

 have been done to set forth the whole matter in its proper light, but 

 since they did not give the requisite precision to Pursh's generally 

 loose and vague, sometimes wholly erroneous, indications of locality, 

 that duty seems to devolve upon me. 



In reading Mr. Meehan's paper, I have been little short of 

 astounded at the kind of geography which seems to have answered 

 the purposes of the botanists concerned in this case. Nothing of 

 the sort would satisfy a zoologist, I am sure. To describe a new spe- 

 cies upon a type specimen, assigned to " the banks of the Missouri," 

 or to " the valleys of the Rocky Mountains," would not be tolerated 

 in zoology, and should not be endured in botany, when the data 



