292 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1898. 



required to pin every dated specimen down to the precise spot where 

 it was collected are ample, and easily accessible in the edition of 

 Lewis and Clark which I brought out in 1893. 



Neither praise nor blame attaches to me for any of the botany 

 which appears in that work. As stated in my preface, most of the 

 botanical determinations were those of Mr. F. H. Knowlton, whom 

 I engaged for that purpose, and whose identifications of the plants 

 mentioned or described by Lewis and Clark I accepted without 

 question in any instance. That they should all prove to be correct 

 was not to be expected, and I am now aware of several errors. In 

 the case of the trees, the mistakes have, perhaps, all been detected 

 and corrected in the admirable critical review lately published by 

 Professor C. S. Sargent in Garden and Forest, Nos. 465, 466, Janu- 

 ary 20th and 27, 1897. I could wish that the same searchlight had 

 been turned by Mr. Meehan and his collaborators upon the rest of 

 the botany in my book, and venture to suggest that the whole sub- 

 ject will not be put in its full light or final shape till this has been 

 thoroughly well done. 



Great as are the obligations under which Mr. Meehan and his as- 

 sistants have placed all who are in any way interested in this sub- 

 ject, in the paper which I now proceed to annotate geographically, 

 there remains for some one the agreeable and useful task of review- 

 ing Lewis and Clark's botanical text as distinguished from their 

 specimens. For it is a curious fact, as I find on studying Mr. Mee- 

 han's paper, that the plants of which Lewis and Clark have most to 

 say in their Journal, are not, as a rule, those of which specimens are 

 now extant in their herbarium. Their botany, it may be said, runs 

 in two parallel courses. One of these is represented by the speci- 

 mens which they collected, and which became so many of Pursh's 

 types ; the other, by the herbs, shrubs and trees which they observed, 

 and noted in their narrative, but did not actually collect. Often- 

 times, to be sure, they describe what is in the herbarium, but I 

 should imagine that fifty, if not a hundred species are to be found 

 in the book, no specimens of which are known to be extant. This 

 would appear to me to be a field of research at once alluring and 

 stimulating to some well equipped botanist, and I trust that the 

 work may soon be done once and forever. Lewis and Clark's whole 

 botany could easily be set abreast of the status I have myself been 

 able to confer upon their zoology, their ethnology and their geo- 

 graphy. 



