The Plant World 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POPULAR BOTANY. 



VoL IV. APRIL, 1901. No. 4. 



HINTS ON HERBORIZING. 

 By a. H. Curtiss. 



WHEN I was a beginner in botanj^ there was no limit to my am- 

 bition nor to tlie confidence I had in my capacity for work. I 

 took in the whole vegetable kingdom, and devoted no little 

 time to the animal and mineral kingdoms. But my self-confidence 

 gradually abated; various branches of study were dropped from jear to 

 year, till finally I came to be known as a mere collector of southern 

 United States phaenogams and ferns. I use the adjective " mere " in 

 deference to what I consider popular opinion. If, instead, I had 

 joined in the great and patriotic undertaking which is now being 

 pressed so bravely forward, to swell the flora of the United States to 

 50,000 species, I might not have found cause to speak of my botanical 

 labors deprecatingly. Perhaps it is unfortunate that I acquired some 

 fixed and ineradicable ideas of division of labor in botany, by twenty 

 years of rather close association by correspondence with Graj^, Watson, 

 and Engelmann. In those days it was considered utterly presump- 

 tious for any besides those three, Chapman and a very few specialists, 

 to describe new species, revise nomenclature, or rearrange genera and 

 orders. 



It is true that my patience was often sorely tried by the refusal of 

 those good authorities to recognize what I considered new species or 

 varieties, but I could not confident!}^ gainsay their opinions without 

 seeing the herbarium material on which their opinions presumably 

 were founded, and to have defied their opinions would have been folly 

 under the circumstances. Thus schooled in botany, I became fully 

 imbued with Muhlenberg's precept that "it is for but few to name." 

 When I contemplate the new order of things in American botany, I feel 

 impressed with the idea that I am almost tlie on\j one left of those who 



